Modelling of Bicycle Manufacturing via Multi-criteria Mixed Integer Programming

Sustainable manufacturing considers the economic, environmental and social dimensions as equally important. For any product, like the common bicycles, a holistic view on the different life cycle phases has to be taken in order to ensure that resources are utilised adequately. Preferences on the three dimensions might lead to different selections of materials, used equipment or required education for fulfilling the considered objectives.In a first approach, bicycle manufacturing alternatives are identified and modelled via bi-criteria mixed integer programming. The material usage is used to represent the economic dimension and the carbon dioxide equivalent is used to represent the environmental dimension. The computed supported efficient solutions provide reasonable trade-off solutions for the considered bicycle manufacturing problem.