Co-simulation environment for optimizing energy efficiency in production systems

Production processes are resource and energy intensive. To meet the increasing requirements of sustainable production and to assure economic competitiveness, novel strategic approaches are necessary in designing production systems, for which integrated simulation as a holistic decision support tool is proposed. An integrated simulation in terms of a co-simulation allows coupling of simulation environments at runtime in order to link different model descriptions (e.g. differential equations, data-based models) and computational algorithms (e.g. explicit/implicit ODE solvers with independent step sizes). Incorporating interactions across different optimization fields i.e. machines, energy systems and industrial buildings a practical case study identifies significant energy and emission savings.