Optimizing Energy Consumption in a Decentralized Manufacturing System

Abstract

The deployment of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) within manufacturing systems leads to the creation of so-called cyber-physical production systems that consist of intelligent interconnected production facilities. One of the expected features of cyber-physical production systems is found to be the capability of self-organization and decentralized process planning in manufacturing. The functionality as well as the benefit of such self-organization concepts is yet to be proved. In this paper, the implementation of a virtual test field for the simulation of manufacturing systems based on a multi-agent system modeling concept is presented and used to evaluate a concept of decentralized process planning. Thereby, special focus is laid on the impact on energy consumption. The simulation results show the potential for energy reduction in manufacturing by a decentralized process-planning concept and yields hints for further development of such concepts.