The subject matter of this article is a part of a broader and more complex issue: modelling of physical processes and assessment of various variables, such as power consumption, reliability, etc., for the purpose of designing systems, which involve network nodes affected by physical processes.The first part of this article is devoted to presentation of the tool called Energy Simulator. This tool is intended for the purpose of modelling of network systems or processes when power consumption is of interest. The Energy Simulator is constructed as a simulation service able to automatically (i. e. without any human action) construct a model from technical specifications and simulate new / innovative network or system designs and estimate energy use for them. Structurally, the Energy Simulator combines the usage of Simple Object Access Protocol together with calculation / simulation environment. This provides with the possibility of scheduling or parallelization of tasks.For the optimization of existing systems or for designing new ones, consumed energy estimate is a tremendously important part and this new tool could be a handy support for engineers, especially since new governmental laws or directives at the European Union level are being established with strict energy efficiency requirements. The usage of this tool is demonstrated for compressed air systems. We a priori assume that the power consumption in such systems is entirely governed by the thermodynamics of compressed air flow. Implementation of compressed air systems is based on the physical network concept when the system is represented as consisting of functional elements or subsystems that interact with each other by energy flow and variables of physical processes which impact the power consumption.Key words: power consumption, compressed air systems, network, designing, simulation and modelling
InTRoducTIonA system is a group of objects, i. e. elements or subsystems whose interaction serves for a common purpose. Many measures are used to evaluate how closely the design of systems and subsystems meets the desired functionality and constraints. Some of the measures include performance, energy and power consumption, reliability, cost of design and manufacturing.When designing a system, several choices must be made concerning the type of elements to be used and configuration of their assembly. The choice is driven by the objectives
84Robertas Alzbutas, Tomas Iešmantas, Romualdas Škėma, Tomas Blažauskas with the economic costs, reliability, energy consumption associated to the design implementation, system construction and future operation, etc.In addition, designing complex engineered artefacts (and collections of them) most likely requires use of simulations coupled with optimization techniques [1]. As complexity increases, ability to employ intuition (even for understanding the computed trade-offs) declines rapidly. Furthermore, person's ability to actually solve these system optimization problems becomes suspect as dimensionality increases.From all th...