A Production-State Based Approach for Energy Flow Simulation in Manufacturing Systems

Energy Efficiency plays a major role in manufacturing being one of the largest consumers and offering opportunities for cost-savings and improvements. Simulation is an established tool for optimizing manufacturing systems. The paper shows a new production-state based approach for integrating material flow and energy consumption in commercial discrete-event simulation software. Besides typical investigation of production assets, also technical building services as one potential major source for energy consumption are taken into account. The approach considers TBS as energy demand requirements from assets and does not require modeling the behavior of TBS systems. Hence, robust simulation results can be achieved by much faster modeling time.