A multi-agent system for minimizing energy costs in cement production

• A multi-agent system for cost-effective cement production planning is discussed.
• Agents employed in sales are implemented as mobile autonomous software entities.
• The system was actively used inside one of the leading cement plants in Turkey.
• Evaluation showed that the proposed system caused significant energy cost saving.
• Workers in the planning department saved approximately 75% of their working hour.

A cement production planning system is expected to minimize energy costs. Further, such a system needs to be as autonomous as possible to decrease time loss during the communication between related departments of the plant. Hence, in this paper, we present a multi-agent system (MAS) in which software agents work collaboratively in order to assist production, planning and sales departments of a cement plant for the generation of cost-effective cement production plans. Implemented system was deployed and actively used inside one of the plants of a leading cement company in Turkey. Evaluation result shows that the utilization of the proposed system caused a significant energy cost saving. Moreover, workers in the planning department of the cement plant saved approximately 75% of their working hour by using the system. Total workload of the employees (including all departments) decreased to its half.