IoT based manufacturing system with a focus on energy efficiency

Energy price has increased rapidly in recent years. As energy being the second greatest cost aside from raw material, factory owners have shown an increasing awareness of overall energy consumption, with a strong desire to have it reduced. The emergence technologies like solar, wind, and energy storage system have brought a significant saving potential for energy cost but also made it more complex for energy use and management. So far, some solutions have been purposed with a specific quantitative focus while others present general qualitative analysis. However, a quantitative solution with plug-and-play property has not been proposed. Here we discuss key requirements of such system and propose an architecture of manufacturing system that is based on Internet-of-Things (IoT) with a focus on improving energy efficiency through quantitative analysis and production planning. A production planning model has been constructed with various constraints concerning distributed energy resources as well as actual work conditions. The results show that implementation of such system introduce great saving potentials.