Summary Cooling water systems (CWS) are one of the main energy and water using operations in industry. Existing CWS in operation provide high improvement potentials in environmental and economic performance through optimized operation and system control. Industry often fails to realize these potentials, given that the efficiency measures as well as their technical, economic, and ecological impact are mostly unknown because of the lack of appropriate approaches. This article presents a holistic approach to the systematic identification and assessment of efficiency measures that support industry in improving the operation and system control of large‐scale CWS consisting of one or multiple cooling towers, heat exchangers, and pumps. Based on material flow analysis coupled with process modeling, a material and energy flow model of CWS is developed. The model enables the investigation of different adjustments in operation of CWS in order to identify and assess specific efficiency measures. The approach is applied to a CWS of a real manufacturing facility. The results show, first, high validity of the approach as compared to a real system. Second, the effectiveness of the approach, given that the model allows fast and simple identification and assessment of efficiency measures that save up to 16% energy and 24% water in the presented case study.

Today's automotive markets are characterized by high demand volatility. As a consequence, flexibility to re-allocate production volume within the production networks is required, to match the production capacity for specific models with market demand. The sustained re-allocation of models to production lines to adjust to market demand is no longer a vision, but virtually industry standard. Hence, model plant allocation decisions are no longer a one time long term decision but a more frequent mid term planning task, for which current strategic decision support models are inadequate. Modified planning models are required to handle the increased flexibility. A modeling framework will be presented.

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