Energy-aware scheduling in reconfigurable multiple path shop floors

Individualization as a major driver in societal change forces companies to adapt to continuously changing customer-specific requirements. Therefore, companies incorporate novel enabling technologies such as digitalization, servitization, and reconfigurability in manufacturing systems. Even though the research on reconfigurable systems has continued over the last 20 years, the energy management of such systems has barely been considered. This work represents recent trends connected with energy efficiency and energy flexibility in reconfigurable manufacturing systems. A suitable attempt to model an energy-related system is proposed using scheduling operations which are subject to power requirements, i.e. variable power thresholds. The results of the optimization show that reconfigurable systems support the adaptation of energy consumption to variable thresholds.