Scheduling of distributed additive manufacturing machines considering carbon emissions

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is a rapidly growing technology shaping the future of manufacturing. In an increasingly competitive economy, additive manufacturing can help businesses to remain agile, innovative, and sustainable. This paper introduces the multi-site additive manufacturing (AM) machine scheduling problem considering carbon emissions caused by production and transportation. A mixed-integer linear programming model is developed aiming to optimise two separate objectives addressing economic and environmental sustainability in a multiple unrelated AM machine environment. The former is the total cost caused by production, transportation, set-up and tardiness penalty and the latter is the total amount of carbon emissions caused by production and transportation. The model is coded in Python and solved by Gurobi Optimizer. A numerical example is provided to represent the basic characteristics of the problem and show the necessity of the proposed framework. A comprehensive computational study is conducted under 600s and 1800s time limits for two main scenarios and the results have been elaborated. This article introduces the concept of considering both economic and environmental sustainability caused by production and transportation, proposing the first mathematical model and measuring its performance through a comprehensive experimental study.