Autonomous Energy-aware production systems control

Energy and resource efficiency has recently become one of the most relevant topics of research in manufacturing, both as industry accounts for a major part of the world energy consumption and in the context of the increasing attention to the need of sustainable development at planetary level. This work aims at paving the way to the development of novel energy-aware control policies of production systems, by means of autonomous decisions about their states in terms of production and energy consumption, exploiting the possibilities given by the new ICT technologies, such as Internet of Things and cloud computing, which allow seamless information sharing among the machines through an appropriate and standardized ICT infrastructure. The energy saving control approach investigated in this work exploits the current trend in research to reduce the idle time of machines in favor of stand-by states, obtaining significant savings in terms of energy, by allowing novel solutions for decentralized control. The proposed control enables the production machines to autonomously share with and process the information of the other machines in the system to decide in real-time their specific energy behaviour, even postponing processing if that is possible. The approach adopted includes conceptual development of the dynamic behaviour models of the system and the proposed policies, then their deployment in an application scenario taken by actual industry cases and data, enabling study of the performance of the system with a detailed design of experiments. The proposed approach represents a significant contribution to the state of the art, as the proposed energy-aware control enables decisions based on real-time information instead of statistically-based forecasts of part arrival rates, as in the previous literature; furthermore the approach is of relevant value for the practitioner, especially as it paves the way to an operationalization to the vision of Cyber-Physical Systems and Industry 4.0.