Simulation-based machine shop operations scheduling system for energy cost reduction

Owing to the ever increasing requirements in sustainability, manufacturing firms are trying to reduce their energy consumption and cost. In this paper, we propose a simulation-based machine shop operations scheduling system for minimizing the energy cost without sacrificing the productivity. The proposed system consists of two major functions: (1) real-time energy consumption monitoring (through power meters, a database server, and mobile applications) and (2) simulation-based machine shop operations scheduling (through a machine shop operations simulator). First, the real-time energy consumption monitoring function is developed to collect energy consumption data and provide real-time energy consumption status monitoring/electrical load abnormality warnings. Second, the simulation-based machine shop operations scheduling function is devised to estimate the energy consumptions and cost of CNC machines. In addition, an additive regression algorithm is developed to formulate energy consumption models for each individual machine as simulation inputs. The proposed system is implemented at a manufacturing company located in Tucson, Arizona state of USA. The experiment results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed system in achieving energy cost savings without sacrificing the productivity under various scenarios of machine shop operations.