Saving energy on shop floor control level: Prerequisites for energy-related scheduling within manufacturing execution systems

Energy efficiency is becoming an important topic for the manufacturing industry. Nowadays the unique features of production systems like precision, endurance, flexibility and initial costs must be extended by the energy efficiency. Using different control strategies on shop floor control level promises energy savings and prevention of unwanted high power peaks. This paper focuses on the investigation of prerequisites required to implement energy saving on shop floor control level within a manufacturing execution system. Electrical energy measuring methods together with evaluation heuristics and energy consumption models for robots and machine tools are shown. The concepts are validated using a production scenario based on a machine tool, two robots and a band conveyor. An application of the energy saving methods for manufacturing execution systems is shown.