Method for Selecting Improvement Measures for Discrete Production Environments Using an Extended Energy Value Stream Model

Improving energy efficiency in discrete manufacturing environments has been one of the key goals of recent research and industrial activities in production management, leading to a large and still increasing amount of different methodologies and improvement measures in that field (here called “Solution Elements”). Despite the growing interest, most of these are rarely applied, or are implemented in an improper manner instead of identifying and realizing the most appropriate ones from a holistic, factory wide perspective. For coping with these challenges a flexible, multi criteria and multi step selection process is introduced by which the applicability of solution elements is evaluated for a specific discrete production environment. The selection process is based on an approach taking multiple criteria derived from the current (as-is) situation in a factory as well as from user preferences into account. For data gathering an extended energy value stream approach is utilized that allows the derivation of value stream specific energy and cost drivers. The approach was tested in an industrial use-case, which is introduced in this paper.