Distribution of control functionality in energy-aware industrial building environment

Abstract

Modern trends in automation require flexible production with an onus on saving energy. Till recently, the focus of production systems has been only saving production costs, but the growing concern over environmental impact of such system has led to a partial change in paradigm. The key for the future generation production system is to successfully integrate the manufacturing environment with energy optimisation. This relies on transparent representation of the building from the point of the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) that is not feasible using conventional centralized approaches to building thermal modeling and optimization. This work focuses on distributing the building automation system in a set of generic cells that encapsulate thermal energy models and optimization algorithms to minimize computational resources required for the system implementation on embedded devices. Combined with a notion of the global overview of the energy optimization with functional aggregation and dynamic clustering concepts, the proposed architecture provides a flexible energy saving solution that can be easily integrated in majority of conventional manufacturing systems as well as related factory buildings without compromising production operations.