A hybrid optimization approach for sustainable process planning and scheduling

Process planning and scheduling are important stages in manufacturing, and good strategies can significantly improve the energy performance of manufacturing to achieve sustainability. In this paper, an innovative optimization approach has been developed to facilitate sustainable process planning and scheduling. In the approach, honey-bee mating and annealing processes are simulated to optimize multi-objectives including energy consumption, makespan and the balanced machine utilization. Experiments on practical cases show that the optimization results from this approach are promising in comparison with those from a genetic algorithm, a honey bee mating optimization algorithm, ant colony optimization and a simulated annealing algorithm, respectively.