Resource and Energy Efficiency in Production

Increasing raw material prices and scarcity of natural resources in combination with escalating environmental impact, force both producers and users of manufacturing equipment to realize re-source efficient production systems.
Production systems have low energy awareness despite indications that an average 30% decrease of the energy costs is within reach. The primary focus is instead on producing quickly and inexpensively. Furthermore, uncertainty in energy costs and availability necessitates better under-standing of the correlation between manufactur-ing activities and energy consumption.  To facili-tate environmental compliance and competitive advantage, manufacturers must evaluate and re-duce energy costs to mitigate overall manufactur-ing costs.  Therefore, manufacturers must ex-pand their current performance metrics of opti-mized quality, cost, and lead time to incorporate energy consumption. The need for systematic energy management in production is evident.

Objective of the research activities of the De-partment of Assembly technology and Factory Management of the Technische Universität Berlin is the development of integrated analysis, evalu-ation and optimization methods for the improve-ment of the energy efficiency of production sys-tems. Energy consumption equipment profiles are used as a basis for the optimization of pro-duction systems, in both planning and control. The developed methods aid production equip-ment producers and users to select energy effi-cient components and develop new planning and control strategies.

• Integration of energy efficiency metrics and objectives in existent methods of production planning and control in order to decrease energy costs.
• Simulation of the energy consumption of pro-duction systems in order to optimize the pro-duction strategy under varying market de-mand.
• Simulation of the energy consumption of pro-duction equipment in various operating states in order to determine improvement potentials.
• Production equipment maintenance and over-haul based on energy consumption monitoring.