Sustainable Production Planning and Control in Manufacturing Contexts: A Bibliometric Review

Production planning and control (PPC), responsible for all the activities that keep production running regularly, plays an essential role in the transition to more sustainable manufacturing systems. PPC decision-making processes need to be driven by sustainable principles even if this makes them more effortful and complex from the strategic to operative level. This study aims to review the scientific literature relating to sustainable PPC. A bibliometric analysis of 437 papers published on the Scopus database was performed to identify the most relevant articles, authors, and journals and to provide the current topic trends and future research themes and gaps. The findings revealed the increasing interest in this topic mainly since 2018. China and the USA are the most productive countries, whereas the Journal of Cleaner Production and Sustainability are the most productive journals. The analysis has also highlighted the ways to address sustainability issues in PPC, e.g., by integrating in scheduling models objectives related to sustainability or by removing barriers to reverse logistics and circular economy at the PPC level. The following topics, instead, deserve further research: attention to the social issues in PPC and the development of decision support systems that will improve companies' PPC decision-making capabilities in sustainable optics.