Assessing a proposal for an energy-based Overall Equipment Effectiveness indicator through Discrete Event Simulation

Abstract

New challenges demand that manufacturing companies adopt sustainable approaches and succeed in this adoption. Energy efficiency plays a key role in achieving sustainability goals, and performance indicators are necessary beyond measurement of data to evaluate energy efficiency. In this landscape, scalable and easy-to-understand metrics providing an energy competitiveness degree of manufacturing resources are currently missing. The study aims to test through simulation applicability and potential offered by a novel Energy Overall Equipment Effectiveness - Energy OEE - indicator for discrete manufacturing firms. A simulation of a discrete manufacturing CNC machine case is used to evaluate the applicability of using Energy OEE assessment for management decision support. As a result, this study paves the way to a better exploitation of data that energy monitoring and sensor technology aim to offer in the future.