Energy consumption monitoring for the order fulfilment in a ubiquitous manufacturing environment

The objective of this study is to monitor manufacturing energy consumption (MEC) in a discrete manufacturing enterprise, where energy is consumed everywhere and anytime with creating ubiquitous MEC data. The ubiquitous manufacturing (UbiM) technology, including radio frequency identification (RFID) technique, is employed to automate real-time data acquisition and processing for an order fulfilment. An MEC model for the order fulfilment is constructed according to the bill of materials (BOM). In this model, the computation is triggered by an RFID read event (RRE) enabling a digital energy metre to acquire energy consumption value of a workstation for processing a certain material, and then the acquired value is assigned to an energy consumption event (ECE). To reflect the effect of an ECE on energy consumption of a production task, a station-material energy consumption matrix (smECM) is constructed to store the relevant event data, which plays a key role in alleviating MEC monitoring restrictions caused by big energy data. By operating the matrix, the MEC monitoring information can be effectively extracted. To assist manufacturing enterprises to better employ it, the proposed method was demonstrated by monitoring MEC of an order in an auto-part manufacturer.