Optimization of carbon emission considering production planning at enterprise level

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cause climate changes, and their impact on the environment continues to increase. As a result, there is an urgent need to accelerate efforts to reduce GHG emissions. In industry, the majority of the current methods of reducing GHG emissions depend on technical enhancements of the facility and equipment. These methods focus on local optimization for carbon emission reduction in enterprises and may require additional time, money and effort for satisfactory implementation. Unlike technical approaches that focus on the equipment, this paper proposes an approach that combines carbon footprint analysis and production planning. The carbon footprint of the entire company’s operational process can be analyzed systematically using this approach. Subsequently, carbon emissions can be reduced significantly through production planning and optimization. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a pharmaceutical enterprise is employed as an example. A production planning model is constructed based on the energy consumption analysis of different units and equipment. Using this model, the carbon emissions of the enterprise can be analyzed, and the corresponding production plan can be developed. To determine the optimal solution, a hybrid discrete particle swarm algorithm is developed and tested based on real data collected from the pharmaceutical enterprise. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed novel approach is effective and carbon emissions of the enterprise can be reduced by an average of 6.77%, or a reduction in CO2 emissions of 610.2 tons per year.