No abstract

Over the past decades, the economic and environmental soundness of manufacturing systems are often questioned because of the large consumption of energy and primary materials. In order to investigate potential opportunities towards achieving the material and energy efficiency in these systems, it is essential to model these flows and associated complexity in detail. An isolated consideration of individual processes which in themselves are comprised of sub-processes is not a sufficient approach. To obtain a reasonable level of detail from the system, hierarchical structure of energy and material consumers in the system is required. In this paper a simulation based approach is presented to model energy and material flows. This approach considers hierarchical structure of energy and material consumers within the system. It can be served as a base to identify hotspots and to assess the effectiveness of retrofitting exercise through what-if scenarios. An industrial case study is used to demonstrate the applicability and the validity of the proposed approach.

No abstract

Over the past decades, the rising energy prices and imposing environmental regulations have motivated manufacturers to improve the energy efficiency of their manufacturing processes. Manufacturers need to also consider energy efficiency in addition to classical performance measures. The additional performance dimension (energy-related indicators) significantly increases the complexity of classical production planning problems (e.g. scheduling), already known as NP-hard problem).To overcome the inherited complexity, an integrated simulation-optimization framework is proposed. The proposed approach tackles scheduling problem in a multi-product/multi-machine manufacturing environment and optimizes several production objectives simultaneously. A case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach in a real-life industrial facility.