Energy-efficient cyber-physical production network: Architecture and technologies

Energy efficiency has become an integral aspect of today's manufacturing. As manufacturing activities become increasingly distributed while connected in the new era of manufacturing - Industry 4.0, energy-efficient manufacturing strategies and methodologies should be implemented in a global production network. The research work reported in this paper endeavors to develop a feasible solution to implementing energy-efficient manufacturing in such an environment by proposing a technical architecture, integrated with the developed platform, MCloud. The overall technical architecture is discussed in detail, particularly, the proposed Energy-efficient Manufacturing (E2M) module and two-round communication procedure. Feature-based technology was adopted in process planning to assess the technical capability and energy consumption of connected virtual factories. MCloud allows each party in this production network to use local energy consumption models for energy assessment with great flexitity and privacy protection. A case study was presented to demonstrate the way distributed manufacturers collaboratively work on a manufacturing job, proving that the enhanced MCloud can coordinate customized production activities based on energy-saving needs in an Industry 4.0 environment.