Decision Support for Energy-saving Idle Production Facility Operations in a Production Line Based on an M2M Environment

During the design, construction and improvement stages of a production system, productivity and energy consumption should be optimized to reduce energy consumption while maintaining productivity at a certain level. Many recent production facilities reduce their energy consumption by switching to idle states. Such facilities are implementing machine tool and industrial robot production facilities. However, the operations of these facilities are yet to be fully investigated and developed; this is hindering their introduction to general production lines. To improve this situation, we propose an operational method for energy-saving idle facilities in production lines and verify its effectiveness in a case study.