Automotive

The automotive industry is an important branch in many industrialized countries in Europe, the USA, Japan, and China. Recent political developments provide challenges to achieve carbon–neutral production and to switch from combustion engines to electric engines or other alternative fuels. This is also reflected in the development of simulation in production and logistics, where energy-related questions became more present in recent years. In this chapter, data from the ASIM working group about related literature are analyzed. Topics and architectures already being examined in energy simulation in the automotive industry are reviewed. The developments are illustrated by two application cases. The first use case shows the importance of simulating the power consumption and charging strategies of automated guided vehicles on the performance of the material flow system. The second example shows the possibilities of integrating complex thermodynamic processes into the material flow simulation by combining continuous and discrete models. The chapter ends with a short conclusion on the state of the art regarding energy simulation in the automotive sector.