Multi-level awareness of energy used in production processes

To ensure green manufacturing, the energy consumption of production processes should be transparent and minimized. Also, to achieve the desired level of energy consumption awareness and efficiency improvements, energy use should be measured in more detail and linked to production data. In this scenario, real-time monitoring of energy consumption represents an essential step to increasing energy awareness, efficiency and the support of energy-aware production processes. This paper seeks to provide a way to achieve multi-level awareness of the energy used during production processes. The multi-level awareness of energy consumption means identifying the amount of energy used, CO2 emitted, and the cost of the energy used at operation, product, and order level. This multi-level awareness is achieved by integrating energy usage data with production data at the operational level. Furthermore, energy sources need to be considered to define the amount of CO2 that is emitted from the production process for each product. A pilot study was carried out to integrate electrical energy data, production data and scheduling data in real time to achieve the multi-level awareness of energy used in production. The results show that integrating energy with production data enables factories to provide specific energy consumption information for decision makers at the factory level, as well as for the consumers and the regulators. This integration of energy and production data is achieved efficiently when there is a high level of standardization of production processes and the availability of detailed energy usage data. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.