A service-oriented architecture and its ICT-infrastructure to support eco-efficiency performance monitoring in manufacturing enterprises

Abstract

Energy consumption and contaminant emissions to the ecosphere are two of the main environmental concerns nowadays in the industrial landscape. Both environmental performance indicators are currently being observed very closely by governments and society for their long envisioned impact on our planet’s future. Moreover, the environmental performance of manufacturing enterprises should not be studied in isolation, since production contributes significantly to the gross development product of all nations, so enterprises’ economic productivity and environmental performance, known as eco-efficiency, should be considered intertwined. Therefore, at the same time that production environmental footprint is considered, production economic aspects are also part of the green equation for achieving eco-efficient manufacturing enterprises. Furthermore, as enterprise information systems and manufacturing technologies evolve, their usefulness should be considered to aid factories to become more eco-efficient and reduce their energy consumption and emissions footprints in a competitive way. The Research & Technological Development work reported in this paper is part of the Factory ECO-MATION EU-FP7 project, which aims to create eco-efficiency monitoring solutions for eco-factories. The Factory ECO-MATION architecture integrates data from environmental sensors, production information and energy consumption records in order to allow their simultaneous monitoring, so that the production planning and control parameters can be adjusted to keep all production goals at a reasonable scale while protecting the environment. This paper describes an ICT-Infrastructure based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) capable of integrating production and environmental information from diverse data sources in order to support the eco-efficiency performance monitoring of manufacturing enterprises.

Keywords:

• eco-efficiency
• energy consumption
• emissions footprints
• production
• SOA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Eco-efficiency – strategy that aims at minimising ecological damage while maximising efficiency of the production processes.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented in this document is a contribution for the Factory ECO-MATION (Factory ECO-friendly and energy efficient technologies and adaptive autoMATION solutions) project funded by the European Commission, FP7 FoF.NMP.2012-1, under the Grant Agreement No [314805].