Redesigning industrial composite production planning and control for energy awareness

Abstract

The European Union's requirement for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from all value chains by 2050 affects most of the manufacturing activities all over the continent. The industrial production of composite parts, favored for new designs throughout the aerospace industry, does not constitute an exemption. For securing global competitiveness, CFRP manufacturers need to adapt to increasing fluctuations in energy supply and prices, induced by a growing share of renewable energy sources. Besides employing more efficient production technologies, decoupling of labor and energy intensive tasks will play a key part. Thereby, energy intensive tasks can be performed while general energy supply is high and demand is low, leading to comparatively lower prices. The perspective of energy supply and price becomes a crucial part in the design of modern production planning and control systems, not only for smokestack businesses, but for small and medium load energy consumers as well. In this contribution, a mathematical representation for modeling industrial scale composite manufacturing is proposed. Beside manufacturing's fundamental production planning and control constraints, CRFP manufacturing's very own peculiarities are outlined and considered as well. It is shown how the virtual mathematical representation of a CFRP manufacturing environment can assist in its energy aware redesign and optimization.