An Agent-Based Factory Simulation Tool to Assess Energy Consumption in Decentralized Manufacturing Systems: Agent Types and their Tasks

Rising energy costs and volatile energy prices are motivation to integrate energy consumption with planning processes in manufacturing. Since centralized approaches for Manufacturing Control (MC) tend to ignore local energy related information, it is necessary to examine the potential of decentralized MC approaches. For this purpose, a factory simulation tool has been implemented. This paper presents the underlying assumptions behind the simulation tool and how the MC algorithms it uses are implemented using an agent-based simulation approach.