A honey-bee mating optimization approach of collaborative process planning and scheduling for sustainable manufacturing

The environmental impact of manufacturing processes is closely associated with energy consumption. Decreasing energy consumption of manufacturing processes can significantly improve the environmental performance of manufacturing to obtain sustainability. However, in most manufacturing process planning and scheduling methods, little attention has been paid to the energy consumption. In this paper, an energy consumption model and a honey-bee mating optimization (HBMO) approach have been developed to take the energy consumption into account as an objective to facilitate sustainable manufacturing process planning and scheduling. In the approach, a honey-bee mating process is simulated to achieve the optimization process where makespan and energy consumption are used as the performance criteria. A case study of process planning and scheduling is given. The experimental results are promising and compare well with the final results of the genetic algorithm based optimization approach.