Enabling Energy-Flexibility of Manufacturing Systems through New Approaches within Production Planning and Control

In the past decades, energy has become a crucial success factor in manufacturing. Due to annually rising energy costs, factories are strongly focusing on concepts and technologies increasing the energy efficiency within their manufacturing systems. With the energy turnaround in Germany, industrial companies are currently facing new challenges in order to maintain an energy-cost-efficient production. Based on the decision to shift the energy generation gradually from conventional power station towards a renewable generation, the electrical energy supply is shifting to a complex and volatile system. The reason for this trend is the characteristic of the renewable energy generation from photovoltaic and wind power stations, which is depended on the weather conditions and thus is fluctuating. Therefore, supply and demand need to be synchronized in an efficient way. Demand side management offers companies the chance to profit from this challenge by interacting in an efficient and flexible way with their energy demand towards the public power grid. This can be archived by gaining the ability to adapt the manufacturing systems to short-term changes within the energy market with little loss in time, effort, costs and performance. These goals can be reached by implementing the concept of energy-flexibility. The efficient and economic allocation of resources is one main goal in the field of production planning and control. Energy-efficiency has already been widely discussed in literature, but with a strong focus on reducing the overall amount of energy used in production which is not necessarily in line with reducing the energy costs. This paper provides systematic approaches how the concept of energy-flexibility can be integrated in the sequential processes of production planning and control systems. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.