Energy Efficiency

Today there is a big challenge for producing companies to improve their energy efficiency. Generally, a lot of separate measures are performed to optimize energy efficiency of objects in a factory. Because of a missing holistic consideration of interdependencies between the objects in a factory, a huge potential to save energy is completely ignored. To encounter this obvious weak point, the developed method, which is descripted in this article, enables to valuate and design energy efficient factories considering the interdependencies. The factory is observed on two different levels of detail. The method is focused on small and medium-sized factories.

The lack of information concerning energy flows can be seen as a significant barrier to increase energy efficiency in an industry. The extension of energy measurement systems often fails due to the difficult appraisal of expected reflux. The suggested model presents a way to overcome this barrier by forecasting potentials and including soft facts into the appraisal as well. Learning effects objectify the presented model through time and make it more stable. As a result an expected net present value can be calculated and used to estimate the benefit of installing a measurement device into a given technical system.

Current political developments regarding the withdrawal from nuclear energy will probably result in an additional increase in energy costs over the next few years. This increases the relevance of reducing energy consumption in production for industrial enterprises. Thus, in addition to quality, cost, delivery reliability and flexibility, energy efficiency is integrated as an additional performance criterion in the decisions of production managers. An important instrument to increase energy efficiency in production processes is the implementation of energy management. This paper presents the advantages of an integrated energy management and outlines the main tasks and methods. IT solutions are presented that assist companies in configuring and controlling production processes to become more energy efficient.

During the last decades, automotive manufacturers have outsourced many processes. Hence, complex networks consisting of automotive manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers have grown in the automotive industry. The resulting transports of components in these networks often require special load carriers. Consequently, companies nowadays face the challenge to handle a growing number of load carriers. For improving the load carrier management a higher transparency is required regarding the load carriers in the whole network. Transparency can be assured by the application of radio frequency identification technology. However, especially logistics service providers have to invest in this technology, which can be implemented in different ways. In this paper, some application possibilities are described and analyzed regarding economic and energy efficiency.

In many industries the success of companies depends on efficient and sustainable processes: In which way higher output can be achieved by less resource consumption? Many process optimization projects improve single processes but not the whole process chain. Thus a high amount of potentials of resource efficiency are unutilized in manufacturing. For realising enormous achievements energy and resource efficiency have to be integrated into the optimization process.

The article presents an approach for the integration of the energy efficiency in factory planning processes. The main focus is not on the constructional hull but rather on the energy-efficient designing of production processes and production plants. The approach is of general validity but in the present example it is applied to the automotive industry. Main contents of the approach are aimed at the life cycle consideration of production plants.