Increasing energy efficiency through simulation-driven process evaluation

Continuous improvement of the production efficiency is one of many goals a company has for attaining a sustainable market position. When considering traditional objectives, benchmarks are used to compare numerous improvements concerning required inputs and created outputs. Adopting this approach for increasing the energy efficiency of individual manufacturing steps is difficult as their comparability is usually low. However, motivated by the need for competitiveness, regulatory mandates, and a desire for proactive green behaviour, companies seek for sustainable measures to make their manufacturing operations environmentally benign and thus require means for the ecologic assessment of their production processes. This paper presents a novel approach to benchmarking and process evolution, which minds both traditional economic and energy related key performance indicators (KPI). For this purpose, a procedure model making use of an enhanced material flow simulation system has been developed to evaluate and scrutinize the energy efficiency in production processes.