An Empirical Study of the Energy Consumption in Automotive Assembly

An empirical study of the energy consumption of an automotive assembly line, under various scenarios and demand profiles is presented. With the use of simulation an automotive assembly line of an automotive Body-in-White (BiW) subassembly, the under-Body structure is studied. The production line is investigated in terms of energy consumption, both at a production cell and at a machine level. The study shows that by modelling an assembly line in advance and by including energy considerations, one can possibly save energy and cost. (C) 2012 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Professor D. Mourtzis and Professor G. Chryssolouris