Combining material flow simulation and optimization for sustainable manufacturing – application in automotive paint shops

Abstract

The necessity for sophisticated decision support in industrial manufacturing has been described manifoldly and simulation approaches as well as optimization methods are continuously developed. This can be especially promising when it comes to decision-making with multidimensional requirements of economic and ecological efficiency. However, due to the required expert knowledge, there is still a gap between theoretically applicable and industrially applied methods. The paper therefore presents results of two use cases as part of the European project ECOFACT where different approaches for the combination of simulation and (heuristic) optimization were applied with industry partners. An overview of recent works and systematic literature reviews of sustainable manufacturing and the approaches for combining simulation and optimization is given. Correspondingly, the investigated use cases of automobile paint shops refer to the reduction of environmental impacts by optimized heating processes and an improved batching process to minimize paint waste. In the first case, setup times for heating color pools and ovens were shifted to avoid load peaks in a calculation time of less than one minute. In the second use case batch size was increased by around 25%.