This book provides for the first time an overview on the current approaches and applications of energy aspects in production and logistics by the use of simulation techniques. During the last decade, the importance of energy in the material flow processes has become more and more important. The pressure to reduce the environmental footprint of production and logistics systems will even intensify in future. Therefore, enterprises have started to integrate the use of energy into their planning processes much more than before, even designing feedback loops, e.g., from energy control to production control. This receives additional attention with the increasing use of renewable, but less reliable, energy sources. Care must be taken to establish processes that aim to use energy when it is available. As an example, many industrial processes like melting or coating have significant energy demands, but could vary the point of time of its consumption within specific limits, leading to a very high complexity. ​ It discusses the construction and application of energy-specific performance indicators and analyzes the input information that needs to be acquired before implementing suitable models. On this basis, concrete technical solutions are introduced.

This book contains a collection of contributions related to the design and control of material flow systems in manufacturing. Material flow systems in manufacturing covers a broad spectrum of topics directly affecting issues related to facilities design, material handling and production planning and control. In selecting the papers to include in this book, the scope was limited to the design and operational control aspects related to the physical move ment of parts, tools, containers and material handling devices. Recent develop ments in this area naturally led to concentration on flow systems involving cellular manufacturing, and automated transport equipment such as automated guided vehicles. However, the concepts discussed have general applicability to a wide range of manufacturing flow problems. The book is organized in five major sections: 1. design integration and justification; 2. cell design and material handling considerations; 3. alternative material flow paths; 4. operational control problems; and 5. tooling requirements and transport equipment.

This authored monograph provides in-depth analysis and methods for aligning electricity demand of manufacturing systems to VRE supply. The book broaches both long-term system changes and real-time manufacturing execution and control, and the author presents a concept with different options for improved energy flexibility including battery, compressed air and embodied energy storage. The reader will also find a detailed application procedure as well as an implementation into a simulation prototype software. The book concludes with two case studies. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of green manufacturing systems.

The importance of the energy and commodity markets has steadily increased since the first oil crisis. The sustained use of energy and other resources has become a basic requirement for a company to competitively perform on the market. The modeling, analysis and assessment of dynamic production processes is often performed using simulation software. While existing approaches mainly focus on the consideration of resource consumption variables based on metrologically collected data on operating states, the aim of this work is to depict the energy consumption of production plants through the utilization of a continuous simulation approach in combination with a discrete approach for the modeling of material flows and supporting logistic processes. The complex interactions between the material flow and the energy usage in production can thus be simulated closer to reality, especially the depiction of energy consumption peaks becomes possible. An essential step towards reducing energy consumption in production is the optimization of the energy use of non-value-adding production phases. About the author: Anna Carina Römer was an external doctoral student at the Department of Information Technology in Production and Logistics at the Technische Universität Ilmenau. The main focus of her research was on hybrid simulation models, with a focus on both the conceptual design of hybrid simulation models and the use of hybrid models for the optimization of energy consumption in production plants.