Increased energy efficiency in a Swedish iron foundry through use of discrete event simulation

There is a long lasting debate concerning the rapidly increasing energy prices in Sweden. For industry the prices has increased by roughly 100 percent the last 5 years. This situation has resulted in an extensive energy research and the work of this paper is part of that development. The paper presents a methodology to analyze and reduce the energy use within energy-intensive companies where the Swedish foundries are the main targets. The methodology is tested on a Swedish iron foundry. The paper shows that using specially built simulation models companies can lower their energy costs by planning the production in a more efficient way. The methodology described helps breaking down energy parameters into groups and gives examples of how the simulation model can be built to take energy use into consideration.