Renewables

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy costs, renewable energy sources are of growing importance for manufacturing systems. This chapter gives an outline of different renewables, the complexities that arise from their use, and explains how simulation studies can be applied to address the interactions between manufacturing systems and renewables. To give examples of the challenges of integrating renewables in manufacturing, two applications are presented for simulation in the design and evaluation of manufacturing control strategies under constraints of renewable energy sources. The simulation models include several forms of renewable energy sources, manufacturing resources as well as an energy storage. In these applications, the simulation serves two different purposes. In the first study, the simulation is used to generate training data for an AI algorithm based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. This algorithm is applied to a closely linked manufacturing and energy system in order to balance energy supply and demand. The second application presents how a customized energy tool for a commercial material flow simulation can be used to generate high-resolution load forecasts applying scenarios for order scheduling. Based on the simulation result, the best scheduling alternative for a given energy supply by renewables can be chosen.