A systematic review of aggregate production planning literature with an outlook for sustainability and circularity

Aggregate production planning (APP) is the process of determining production, inventory, and labor levels to meet demand requirements over a planning window up to 1 year. As an emerging field, sustainable APP deals with the accommodation of environmental, economic as well as social sustainability criteria into the planning period which in turn can be achieved by making use of Circular Economy principles in real-world production activities. Different types of models and solution methods have been proposed by many researchers to study the APP problem with applications to a broad spectrum of industries. Yet, there are few studies in the literature that performs a comprehensive review of existing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that offers a systematic review of APP research output spanning the last 50 years. We review about 200 APP papers and systematically classify them with respect to some basic properties (year, type, publisher, publication name and citations) as well as more technical aspects such as model type/structure, solution method, handling of uncertainty and extra features. The main purpose is to find out the current research landscape to link APP with Sustainable Development using digital technologies. Limitations of existing research as well as recommendations for overcoming these shortcomings in the Industry 4.0 era are also discussed. Finally, more insight is given into the APP literature focusing on the sustainability and circularity concepts as well as an outlook for future research directions.