Energy consumption awareness in manufacturing and production systems

Abstract

Industry is a major energy consumer and therefore, manufacturers are continuously trying to reduce manufacturing costs. The improvement of energy usage in manufacturing has been receiving large attention during the last years due to the increasing energy cost and environmental awareness. However, it is still difficult to identify the most energy demanding manufacturing phases in the whole manufacturing process, and which ones can and should be energetically improved. This paper proposes a standard-based infrastructure to collect and monitor energy data in real time for manufacturing and production systems, along with a manufacturing energy management system (MEMS). The collected data improves energy consumption awareness and allows the MEMS to make further analysis and to identify where to take actions in the manufacturing process in order to reduce the energy consumption. The developed MEMS enables energy consumption monitoring with different granularities, depending on where the monitoring devices are placed, that is, per machine, per product process, or for the factory as a whole. The developed MEMS also includes the control of energy related devices to support energy-based decisions and enables the interoperability with a generic manufacturing management system simulation software that works with real monitored energy data in order to test and validate modifications made to the manufacturing process.

Keywords:

• manufacturing energy efficiency
• energy awareness
• real-time energy management
• IEC 61850
• DPWS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work, being part of the Project Produtech PSI [n. 13849] - New Products and Services for the Manufacturing Industry, has been partially funded by the Incentive System for Technology Research and Development in Companies (SI I&DT), under the Competitive Factors Thematic Operational Programme, of the Portuguese National Strategic Reference Framework, and EU’s European Regional Development Fund.