Planning Flow of Material and Energy for Photovoltaics Industry

Abstract Due to the continuously increasing need for renewable energy, the demand for photovoltaic components is significantly growing. Therefore, many highly productive factories for solar cells will be built in the coming years. The development of tools and methods for rapid planning of state of the art and highly automated production facilities for photovoltaic equipment is the objective of the Saxon PV Automation Cluster (S-PAC). So far the focus of factory planning was strongly on discrete part manufacturing while in contrast the production of solar panels involves a lot of chemical processes with different by-products, even though the final output is discrete parts. Hence, it is investigated how methods and tools of discrete manufacturing still can be applied to photovoltaic industry or where adaptations are necessary. From a methodical point of view the Flow System Theory, comprising material, energy, information, value and personnel flow, as well as Component-based Planning, considering planning process and object components, will be in the focus. While in the past the emphasis was on the optimisation of the material flow, the significance of the energy flow is increasing. The realisation of the information flow requires appropriate tool support. The base of the tool support is provided by the concept of the Net Planning Assistant with the Production Database as central storage component. The Production Data Model as foundation for the Production Database has to be adapted to the differing object domain. A reference database of typical objects of photovoltaic cell, wafer and module production is developed as a basis for datasets of particular projects. Models for visualisation and simulation of the photovoltaic objects are connected to the data model. Interfaces to the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and the quality management system need to be defined.