Approach for a Potential Analysis of Energy Flexible Production Systems

Due to the increasing use of volatile renewable energy sources in Europe and especially in Germany, companies' production systems have to be energy flexible in order to cope with changes in energy markets. Therefore, an important requirement for companies is to know about the possibilities of their production systems to adapt load. Hence, several key performance indicators for evaluating production systems have to be developed. This work provides an approach for the evaluation of energy flexibility based on the availability of different machine states in terms of different energy levels. Furthermore, several time dimensions of energy flexibility are taken into consideration. The approach is structured into five different steps. The first step describes the identification of measures for adapting the load of a station to the current energy supply. In order to evaluate the potential of a production system, it is necessary to analyze the combination of different measures of different stations - so called bundle of measures. Therefore, the second step provides a strategy for the enhancement of load adaption by bundling at least two measures. Beside this, it is also possible to improve the temporal characteristics of measures resulting from technical and organizational restrictions by using another bundling-strategy, as described in the third step. The fourth step describes a strategy to reduce the effects caused by interactions between the stations that come along with the execution of measures. The last step describes the evaluation of the bundles with different key performance indicators.