Multi-criteria Decision-making in Carbon-Constrained Scenario for Sustainable Production Planning

Industrial processes are constantly changing owing to increasing demand and technological growth throughout the world. These changes influence environmental, economic, and social pillars of sustainable development to a large extent. So, production needs to be carried via considering the viewpoint of sustainable development which should include multi-criteria decision-making in planning. Including multiple criteria in planning is significant as this inclusion lessens the damaging effects on different pillars of sustainable development. Also, environmental policies are usually framed such that carbon emission need not exceed certain limit. In this paper, an optimal production mix of process routes is determined while satisfying a predefined maximum limit on total carbon emission to obtain most satisfied solution (MSS) for multiple conflicting criteria. This novel approach provides an extension to TOPSIS (Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution) methodology, and an integrated TOPSIS-pinch analysis model is proposed to determine multi-criteria-prioritized factor for ranking of new process routes in carbon-constrained production planning. The obtained MSS provides a unique solution that maximizes benefit and minimizes risk in sustainable production planning. For Iron and Steel industry, energy consumption is observed to be reduced by 74.05 × 106 GJ in comparison to the production plan given by (Sinha and Chaturvedi in J Clean Product 171:312–321, 2018), proposed method facilitates to include other objectives such as operating cost and profit. The proposed methodology is generic and can be applied to other allocation networks, an example is also discussed to show its applicability in water allocation network synthesis.