Sustainable production planning and control

The economic design of production processes is one of the central tasks for production companies. In this context, production planning and control (PPC) has been established for the operational, temporal, quantitative but also spatial planning, control and monitoring of production processes in industry and science. Usually, this total planning problem is decomposed into several sub-problems and described by a planning hierarchy. However, in addition to the economic component, ecological and social aspects have become more important in recent years. An equal consideration of these three dimensions (economic, ecological and social) is called sustainability according to the Triple Bottom Line concept. Even if such sustainability cannot be identified in industry and science to date, since economic objectives dominate, substantial improvements in the ecological and social dimensions can be achieved as well. Recent approaches focus on individual aspects of one of the two dimensions, while approaches to ecological extensions dominate. Typical ecological aspects are, for example, the reduction of energy consumption, emissions, water consumption and waste. With regard to the social dimension the consideration of physical and psychological employee burdens are essential aspects. These include the reduction of ergonomic risks, employee exhaustion and the improvement of employee satisfaction and development. In the context of PPC, these improvements can be achieved, for example, by controlling machine states (avoidance of standby times), taking employee preferences and characteristics into account when allocating resources to production orders, or shifting production quantities to times when there is a high supply of energy from renewable sources. The extension of these considerations as well as the development and investigation of a truly sustainable PPC is one of our central fields of research and development.