Energy-Efficient and Labor-Aware Production Scheduling based on Multi-Objective Optimization

Manufacturing industry is a major energy consumer and greenhouse gas producer for the society. As recent literature points out, energy awareness can he integrated to production scheduling to enable industrial demand side management. Consequently, production loads can be shifted to periods with a lower electricity price for energy cost minimization. However, this may increase the overall production cost, because the labor compensation usually follows the opposite trend with the electricity price. To investigate this trade-off, this paper introduces a scheduling approach that considers both energy consumption and labor shifts. An efficient memetic algorithm is proposed for multi-objective optimization. Numerical experiments on a blow molding process demonstrated two general trade-offs: one between energy cost and labor cost, as well as one between overall production cost and makespan. Therefore, these trade-offs must be considered when performing energy-efficient production scheduling.