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.