Energy and Resource Efficient Manufacturing

–          Energy and Resource Efficiency (ERE) has become one of the most relevant topics of research in manufacturing, as industry accounts for a major part of the world energy consumption and for the need for sustainable development at planetary level. Furthermore, the availability of innovative technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Data Analytics and Cyber-Physical Production Systems, has led to increasing attention to the vision of Industry 4.0, which includes energy and resource efficiency as one of the key areas, together with management of the increasingly complex manufacturing systems. In this context, manufacturers have to completely change their

management systems. Despite the relevance of the problem, many areas are still unexplored: still modeling and simulation of sustainable manufacturing systems lack depth and software tools to exploit the potential of collaborative approaches for global optimization; furthermore, the complexity of the problems of production planning and control and lack of performance indicators hinder development of practical solutions for Operations optimization; finally, despite existence of many advanced industrial automation standards, still Industry 4.0-ready  platforms are not available.
This research project investigates innovative methods to manage, plan and control the future ERE eco-factories, and how to model and integrate from the ICT point of view the novel manufacturing systems in order to tackle the complex and dynamic network of relationships among the different components of the factory at its different levels.
Results of the research so far include:

• holistic model of the future eco-factories;
• ERE KPI framework and KPI development methodology for energy efficiency;
• industrial use case validation of the ERE KPI framework;
• study by simulation of energy-aware autonomous production line control policies;
• laboratory experiment of digital-twin based energy-aware autonomous production line control.