Supply-side energy modelling for Industrial Internet of Things enabled refined energy management in aluminium extrusions manufacturing

Abstract To improve industrial sustainability performance in manufacturing, energy management and optimisation are key levers. This is particularly true for aluminium extrusions manufacturing —an energy-intensive production system with considerable environmental impacts. Many energy management and optimisation approaches have been studied to relieve such negative impact. However, the effectiveness of these approaches is compromised without the support of refined supply-side energy consumption information. Industrial Internet of Things provides opportunities to acquire refined energy consumption information in its data-rich environment but also poses a range of difficulties in implementation. The existing sensors cannot directly obtain the energy consumption at the granularity of a specific job. To acquire that refined energy consumption information, a supply-side energy modelling method based on existing Industrial Internet of Things devices for energy-intensive production systems is proposed in this paper. First, the job-specified production event concept is proposed, and the layout of the data acquisition network is designed to obtain the event elements. Second, the mathematical models are developed to calculate the energy consumption of the production event in three process modes. Third, the energy consumption information of multiple manufacturing element dimensions can be derived from the mathematical models, and therefore, the energy consumption information on multiple dimensions is easily scaled. Finally, a case of refined energy cost accounting is studied to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed models.