Development of a Procedure for Energy Efficiency Evaluation and Improvement of Production Machinery

A major and growing challenge for manufacturing companies is to increase the energy efficiency of their production machinery in order to reduce both their energy costs and their overall environmental impact. Established approaches either focus on optimizing the base line energy consumption of auxiliary production infrastructure, or directly target the optimization of value creating processes like special machine tools. In practice, heterogeneous machinery in operation requires a procedure to prioritize which machine should be improved first. Hence a decision support procedure based on multiple criteria was developed and implemented during a use case. This system combines machine data, production process information and the evaluation of expert knowledge and energy consumption measurements.