Energy-aware decision support models in production environments: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The substantial amount of energy consumed through industrial production has given rise to a large number of research papers that incorporate environmental aspects and increased energy-awareness into production management. Nowadays, initiatives that push sustainable energy sources like wind and solar power together with new technologies for on-site power generation and energy storage open up a multitude of new options for making industrial energy consumption more environmental friendly. With this paper, we review the recent literature that attempts to reflect these options within industrial decision support models. We conduct a systematic literature review that identifies relevant papers from fields like machine scheduling, lot sizing, and other energy-intensive processes. For classifying the literature, a multi-dimensional scheme is developed that helps identifying areas that already received substantial scientific interest and areas that are not yet well understood. To this end, we actively address areas of future research that were mentioned in earlier review papers and show to what extent these gaps where closed by recent publications. Through this, we observe substantial progress with regard to various aspects such as pushing system boundaries, coming up with advanced conceptual approaches, and striving for more practical relevance. Nevertheless, there remains a substantial number of issues that have not yet been approached thoroughly.