Factories4Renewables

Optimizing industrial production processes for supply with 100% renewable energy

Description

The project investigates methods for adapting the planning of industrial production steps in industrial processes to the availability of renewable energy. When changing Austria’s energy supply to 100% renewables (#mission 2030) energy production becomes increasingly volatile. The primary objective and innovation of the project is to enable production plants to plan their manufacturing steps according to a predetermined yet dynamic energy availability in such a way that a given energy profile is maintained by more than 95%. This means that the given energy is not only not exceeded but also used as fully as possible while at the same time ensuring efficient utilization of manufacturing resources. The big challenge is in the handling of the inherent prediction uncertainty of the energy profiles, which increases with increasing planning horizon and production complexity.

Together with the project partners Danube University develops an iterative production planning process to achieve the above goal. Adaptive energy consumption models that are optimized using machine learning techniques increase the planning accuracy, and the inclusion of production-dependent energy storage and recuperation potentials improves the overall efficiency. The concept presented in the project will enable energy-aware production planning for individual production lines, however it will be scalable to allow multiple independent processes to be jointly adapted and optimized for an overarching energy profile.

Within the scope of the project the developed system will also be tested in an industrial laboratory test in the AVL Battery Innovation Center. The results have therefore highly validity for the entire manufacturing industry. A further generalization to other sectors (e.g., food production, logistics) will also be continuously examined.

The project is part of the CELTIC-NEXT project IEoT (Intelligent Edge of Things) where it constitutes a central use case.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided to us by the Klima- und Energiefonds for the Factories4Renewables project within the programme “Energieforschung (e!MISSION)”.

Partners