Manubuilding Phase 2

Modern trends in automation require flexible production. Up to now, production systems only concern was to minimize production costs or optimize the utilization of production resources. But with increasing energy prices and the growing concern over the environmental impact of production systems (industrial systems consume a quarter of all energy in the world), energy efficiency of manufacturing environment cannot be ignored any longer.

MANUbuilding addresses the arising needs by developing a system that optimize the energy consumption of a factory in a holistic way linking together the production process and the factory building. Key service innovations will be control concepts for building-aware production that can pro-actively save energy by mutually utilizing information of the production and building automation system.

The resulting novel solution provides substantial energy savings ranging from 20 to 60%, while at the same it time does not restrict the flexibility of production and offers a convenient engineering. Main building blocks of this solution are Cooperating Object and IEC 61499 Function Blocks. The combination of these technologies allows to achieve a distribute online decision making process resulting in more energy efficient buildings but also in optimal production environments.

** This work is partially co-funded by the European Commission under the European Regional Development Fund according to article 4 ERDF, the county of Lower Austria, and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the Framework Concept ”Research for Tomorrow’s Production” and managed by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA). The authors are responsible for the contents of this publication.