Operational methods for minimization of energy consumption of manufacturing equipment

TLDR

Significant energy savings can be achieved by turning off underutilized manufacturing equipment when it will be idle for a certain period. The study develops operational methods—including dispatching rules and a multi‑objective programming model—to minimize energy consumption of manufacturing equipment. The authors propose dispatching rules and a multi‑objective model that generates non‑dominated solutions for production sequencing, balancing energy use and completion time. Performance analysis shows the dispatching rules effectively reduce energy consumption of underutilized equipment.

Abstract

This paper develops operational methods for the minimization of the energy consumption of manufacturing equipment. It is observed that there can be a significant amount of energy savings when non-bottleneck (i.e. underutilized) machines/equipment are turned off when they will be idle for a certain amount of time. Using this fact, several dispatching rules are proposed. A detailed performance analysis indicates that the proposed dispatching rules are effective in decreasing the energy consumption of especially underutilized manufacturing equipment. In addition, a multi-objective mathematical programming model is proposed to minimize the energy consumption and total completion time. Using this approach, a production manager will have a set of non-dominated solutions (i.e. the set of efficient solutions) which he/she can use to determine the most efficient production sequence which will minimize the total energy consumption while optimizing the total completion time.