Machine scheduling approach for the sustainable development of a residential-industrial area

Rapid urbanization brings many sustainable development challenges, including the impacts of urban factories. While contributing to the improved resource efficiency and growth of the cities, urban factories are often associated with negative impacts on the health and well-being of urban residents. Well-designed engineering controls can be implemented to make the factories more environmentally and socially acceptable. However, administrative controls such as production scheduling can support the already invested efforts to be more effective. In this study, a multi-objective machine scheduling approach is proposed to promote the sustainable coexistence of factories and cities. The scheduling aims to reduce cost, energy consumption, and noise disturbance impacts on the residents, simultaneously satisfying all three sustainability aspects. Our approach is twofold: Firstly, a multi-objective mixed-integer programming model is formulated to ensure energy-efficient and just-in-time scheduling solutions. The electricity cost and total weighted earliness and tardiness penalty are simultaneously minimized. Secondly, a multi-criteria fuzzy decision-making technique is used to select solutions with satisfactory non-processing energy consumption and noise disturbance levels. A benchmark data set of Fisher and Thompson ft06 problem instances are used to demonstrate the application of the model. The analysis results show that the proposed machine scheduling approach can be used to reach low noise disturbance solutions that are also satisfactory on other criteria. The proposed approach is the first attempt to consider all the sustainability dimensions and the sustainable development of a residential-industrial area.