Simulation-based production scheduling with optimization of electricity consumption and cost in smart manufacturing systems

Due to the increasing awareness of environmental protection, the industrial sector is facing mounting pressure to reduce its energy consumption and carbon footprints. The application of energy management system for industrial plants is of high interests by industrial practitioners in their pursuit of high performance smart manufacturing systems. Many system integrators and solution providers have developed their own packages for energy management system for industrial plants. In this paper, we conduct a brief survey on the existing commercial packages of industrial energy management systems by different vendors. A future development direction regarding the functionality of decision-making of industrial energy management system is discussed and a method focusing on the decision-making of energy-integrated production scheduling is proposed. The performance metrics of energy consumption and cost as well as production throughput are modeled for operational performance optimization. A numerical case study of a real auto part manufacturing plant is presented to illustrate the benefits brought by the proposed method.