Proposal and test of a configurable production system Digital Model to support Energy-based Asset Management

Amongst various industries, manufacturing is one of the most energy intensive. Given the increasing attention towards sustainability, huge effort has been put for increasing the energy efficiency of companies. The energy efficiency gain could be reached through different management practices, and Asset Management, which aims at governing the asset system throughout its lifecycle, has great potentialities in being a game changer for this matter. However, the complexity of energy issues requires both technical and managerial perspectives to be tackled, especially when analyzing the entire system rather than the single machine only, while looking for global optimization. Therefore, in this work, the energy modeling topic is primarily analyzed to develop a Digital Model that aims to be the virtual counterpart of physical production plants. The model has three functional blocks, which relate to monitoring, optimization, and prediction. The model is tested through a case study in the cosmetic sector. The Digital Model lays the foundation to develop a system-oriented Digital Twin to support Asset Management and move forward a sustainable and green production. Due to its configurability and design choices, the Digital Model also embeds the stochastic behavior related to maintenance issues; therefore, future works will allow rising the attention of the energy and maintenance aspects, jointly undertaken within the overarching control built on Asset Management principles.