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.

Simulation-Based Optimization: Parametric Optimization Techniques and Reinforcement Learning introduce the evolving area of static and dynamic simulation-based optimization. Covered in detail are model-free optimization techniques – especially designed for those discrete-event, stochastic systems which can be simulated but whose analytical models are difficult to find in closed mathematical forms. Key features of this revised and improved Second Edition include: · Extensive coverage, via step-by-step recipes, of powerful new algorithms for static simulation optimization, including simultaneous perturbation, backtracking adaptive search and nested partitions, in addition to traditional methods, such as response surfaces, Nelder-Mead search and meta-heuristics (simulated annealing, tabu search, and genetic algorithms) · Detailed coverage of the Bellman equation framework for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), along with dynamic programming (value and policy iteration) for discounted, average, and total reward performance metrics · An in-depth consideration of dynamic simulation optimization via temporal differences and Reinforcement Learning: Q-Learning, SARSA, and R-SMART algorithms, and policy search, via API, Q-P-Learning, actor-critics, and learning automata · A special examination of neural-network-based function approximation for Reinforcement Learning, semi-Markov decision processes (SMDPs), finite-horizon problems, two time scales, case studies for industrial tasks, computer codes (placed online) and convergence proofs, via Banach fixed point theory and Ordinary Differential Equations Themed around three areas in separate sets of chapters – Static Simulation Optimization, Reinforcement Learning and Convergence Analysis – this book is written for researchers and students in the fields of engineering (industrial, systems, electrical and computer), operations research, computer science and applied mathematics.