An Approach for Reducing Energy Consumption in Factories by Providing Suitable Energy Efficiency Measures

Energy efficiency has developed into an important objective for industrial enterprises. However, there is still a need for systematic approaches to reduce energy consumption in factories. Existing methods focus on the optimization of manufacturing processes and lack upon considering the entire factory system. Additionally, they are based on a detailed quantitative analysis of processes and thus, they need a high effort during the phase of data acquisition. Therefore, an approach for reducing energy consumption by providing energy efficiency measures to factory planning participants was developed in order to overcome these barriers. The general approach is described in this paper and supported with a use case that demonstrates the required information and possible outcomes in terms of energy efficiency information. Main advantages of this approach are reducing the effort to acquire energy data and the possibility to consider the factory system holistically.