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Motivation
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.
Objectives
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.
Research Areas
- 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.