Sven Rogalski

Knowledge-based intelligent energy management using building automation system

The rise of energy needs and energy prices due to shortage of energy resources force companies and households to consume energy more efficiently. In recent years building automation systems are commonly used to allow better comfort for the occupants, and also to improve security in the building. This paper describes an approach for improving energy efficiency in private and business buildings by utilizing building automation systems. The goal of the approach is to provide an intelligent system that can help the occupants to monitor and control their energy consumption and also to notice their energy saving potentials. This paper also introduces method of knowledge-driven energy analysis that offers more intelligent mechanism as improvement of classical data-driven analysis, which is commonly used by existing energy analysis solutions.

Factory design and process optimisation with flexibility measurements in industrial production

Manufacturing companies operate in increasingly turbulent and discontinuous environments. Uncertain projections regarding future sales, large volume fluctuations, the steady advance of new technologies, and ever-shorter product life cycles, combined at the same time with increasing product variety, demand the constant adjustment of production structures to meet the current market requirements. Uncertainty in the production area requires a continuous transformation of production structures to meet the current requirements on the market. This poses a challenge for manufacturers in the various branches of industry and creates an ever-increasing need for flexibility to find an economic balance, in times of tight budgets, between the prevailing market uncertainties and the correct arrangement of the production systems. In the following document, the applied experience is presented, extracted from the flexibility assessment tool economical flexibility measurement (ecoFLEX). It will be shown along with the practical experience gained in its application at a car-engines plant.

An Intelligent System for Improving Energy Efficiency in Building Using Ontology and Building Automation Systems

Energy efficiency is a keyword that can be found nowadays in all domains in which energy demand exists. The steadily rising energy demand, the consequent energy scarcity and rising prices of energy resources are forcing companies and people to redefine their activities in a more energy efficient way. Besides industry and transportation, the building sector is the most important energy consumer, as a study for European countries showed that up to 40% of the total energy consumption in the EU can be ascribed to this segment. The residential use represents around 3% of the total energy consumption in the building sector (Balaras et al., 2007).

Challenges for Handling Flexibility in the Change Management Process of Manufacturing Systems

The success of a company invariably depends more and more on the ability of a company to recognize changes in its environment at an early stage and to consider these changes timely in its competitive behaviour. Consequently, flexibility marks the ability of a company to master complex environmental situations in order to boost its chances to survive and safeguard its long-term success. In this context, a consistent systematic for the measurement and evaluation of flexibility still remains an open problem. This article picks up this difficulty and delivers a contribution for a practical approach to evaluate flexibility of production systems within the scope of change management.

Methodology to Develop Ontological Building Information Model for Energy Management System in Building Operational Phase

Energy consumption in building sector has been taking a significant percentage of the total energy consumption on earth. This is due to the development of more advanced and sophisticated building appliances to fulfil the comfort requirements. The EU has responded this trend by requiring zero CO2 emission in building by 2020 and by supporting innovative research approaches for improving energy efficiency in buildings with still considering inhabitants comfort. This chapter describes an approach to develop an intelligent system for building specific energy management that allows occupants and facility managers to monitor and control the energy consumption and also detects the energy wasting points. In this chapter, we explain the methodology to develop ontology based information model for building energy management offering expressive representation and reasoning capabilities. We also highlight an approach to develop the ontology as the knowledge base providing the intelligence of the system. Furthermore we show the improvement of the energy performance analysis with the help of ontology based approach.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY EVALUATION IN MANUFACTURING THROUGH AN ONTOLOGY-REPRESENTED KNOWLEDGE BASE

Improving energy efficiency in a manufacturing company through an energy management system requires active participation of different stakeholders and involvement of different organizational entities and technical processes. Interoperability of stakeholders and entities is the key factor to achieve a successful implementation of an energy management system. Researchers have been developing approaches in applying ontologies to address interoperability issues among humans as well as machines. Ontologies have also been used for knowledge representation in different domains, such as energy management and manufacturing. In recent years, researchers have developed knowledge-based intelligent energy management systems in buildings, especially households, which use ontologies for knowledge representation. In the manufacturing domain, ontologies have been used for knowledge management in order to provide a common formal understanding between the stakeholders, who have different background knowledge. This paper proposes an approach to apply ontology to allow knowledge-based energy efficiency evaluation in manufacturing companies. The ontology provides a formal knowledge representation that addresses the interoperability issues due to different human stakeholders as well as machines involved in the energy management system of the company. This paper also describes the methods used to construct and to process the ontology. Copyright

Flexibilitätsbewertung von Produktionssystemen

Kurzfassung Die Anforderungen an Produktionssysteme ändern sich ständig als Folge wandelnder Wettbewerbsbedingungen und den damit verbundenen Leistungszielen von Zeit, Qualität, Kosten und Innovationsfähigkeit. Besonders die verstärkte Planungsunsicherheit, hinsichtlich Art und Umfang der zu fertigenden Produkte, stellt Produktionsunternehmen vor eine schwierige Aufgabe und führt zu einem wachsenden Flexibilitätsbedarf. In diesem Zusammenhang nehmen Methoden zur Bewertung der Flexibilität von Produktionssystemen einen hohen Stellenwert ein. Kerninhalt des hier vorliegenden Beitrags ist die Beschreibung des Aufbaus und der Funktionsweise einer innovativen Bewertungsmethodik namens ecoFLEX, die Produktionsplanern und -managern verlässliche Einschätzungen über die Flexibilität ihrer Produktionssysteme erlaubt.

Handling resource efficiency in production of small and medium sized enterprises

For years, production companies have faced an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market, which results in higher client customization. These coupled with a high complexity of cause-effect relationships of industries, globally-dispersed markets, technologies and economic areas create great challenges to the manufacturing systems. Uncertain projections about future sales, fluctuations in quantities, new manufacturing technologies and shorter product life cycles with changing product requirements, at the same time with an increasing range of variants requires a continuous transformation of production structures to the current requirements on the market. As a consequence, methods for evaluating a companys production flexibility are of great significance. The following article discusses the experience gained in research results in medium-sized production. The use of the IT-framework “WertProNET” that emerged from these results shows the impact that production changes have on economical plant operation, and how unnecessary additional costs from the inefficient use of resources can be avoided.

Resource-Efficient Production Planning through Flexibility Measurements in Value Creation Systems

For years, manufacturing companies have faced an increasingly complex and rapidly changing market environment which is the result of, if nothing else, higher customer individualization. This particularly concerns SME’s, whose competitiveness is increasingly dependent on the early identification of new customer and market requirements and their ability to dynamically respond to these in an adequate fashion. In order to meet the high standards demanded of the planning quality and planning safety with ever increasing complexity and the continuous reduction of the planning time available, SME-compatible IT technologies are needed for the simulation of complex manufacturing relations. The following article addresses this problem and in-troduces the method set ecoFLEX, which enables the simulation of targeted and dynamic alignment of existing plant structures, resources and value-added processes with new production requirements. Unlike digital factory planning tools, a complete picture of the specific plant situation is not required, as will be illustrated by selected case studies from the medium sized production sector.

Interaktive Flexibilitätsbewertung in virtuellen Welten

Kurzfassung Um bei immer komplexer werdenden Marktanforderungen konkurrenzfähig zu bleiben, besteht in der Produktion ein Bedarf an flexiblen Strukturen und Prozessen. Methoden der digitalen Fabrik wie die Flexibilitätsbewertung können mit Virtueller Realität (VR) kombiniert werden, um dem Nutzer zu ermöglichen, in die Simulation einzutauchen. Die interaktiv konfigurierbare Fabrikhalle erlaubt es, Arbeitsplätze, Produktionslinien bis hin zur gesamten Fabrik zu planen oder zu optimieren, und erleichtert allgemein die Entscheidungsfindung.