Simulation-Based Energy Efficiency Improvement for Sustainable Manufacturing Systems

Energy efficiency improvement as well as carbon footprint reduction in the manufacturing industry becomes increasingly important for a green world from the point of sustainability. However, because of the complexity of modern manufacturing systems, most of the existing research efforts in energy efficiency improvement only focus on either single-machine system or process level. Seldom work has been performed to study the potential of energy consumption reduction for typical manufacturing systems with multiple machines and buffers. In this paper, a simulation-based method is proposed to study various strategies for energy efficiency improvement of complex manufacturing systems. This study provides an initial framework to study the real time energy control of multi-machine manufacturing systems, and demonstrates the energy efficiency improvement and energy saving potentials by adjusting the machines\u27 power level according to their operation states while maintaining the system throughput. Comparison between the results with and without power level adjustment is performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method