Since the beginning of the industrialization age, engineers have aimed to increase
productivity and reduce costs. In the last decades, customer orientation has steadily
gained importance and, thus, short and reliable delivery times have become a
competing target, combined with a trend to mass customization. Currently, however,
sustainability aspects are moving into the focus of customers and enterprises. With
respect to production and logistics tasks, this mainly affects the consumption of
energy and, in consequence, the emission of greenhouse gas (GHG). This trend has
been amplified by the dramatic increase in energy costs after the outbreak of the war
in Ukraine, and mirrored by national and international taxes and regulations, such as
the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The scheduled Corporate
Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will have distinct implications on the
annual audit and liquidity of companies.
Methodologies to face these challenges range from the specific acquisition of data
on energy consumption via the allocation of particular production processes and the
experimental planning of improvement up to the simulation of how to integrate
an increasing percentage of renewable energy into current production and logistics
processes. The use cases of the book promote to apply methodologies that help to
comply with these upcoming challenges.
The first applications of material flow simulation have already been reported for
about 50 years. In the last 40 years, simulation has been successfully introduced to
analyze and improve first the material flow and later the related information flow,
enabling engineers to gain deep insights into the behavior of complex modern produc-
tion and logistics systems. Sometimes, energy-related aspects have been considered,
but in most cases indirectly, e.g., reducing the runtime of equipment and only by this
measure decreasing the energy consumption. However, the importance of respecting
energy in the processes has become more and more urgent, and the pressure to reduce
the environmental footprint of production and logistics systems will intensify in the
upcoming decade. Therefore, enterprises have started to integrate their consump-
tion of energy into their planning processes much more frequently than before, even
constructing feedback loops, e.g., from energy control to production control. This
receives additional attention for the increasing use of renewable, but less reliable, energy sources. Care must be taken to establish processes that aim to use energy when
it is available. As an example, many industrial processes like melting or coating have
significant energy demands, but could vary the point of time of its consumption
within specific limits, leading to very high complexity.
Simulation is the technology of choice for the analysis of such complex inter-
connected systems. Nevertheless, there is no satisfying overview of the current
approaches and applications of considering energy for production and logistics simu-
lation. The section “Simulation in Production and Logistics (SPL)” of the Asso-
ciation for Simulation in the German-speaking Area (Germany, Switzerland, and
Austria) (ASIM) responded to the importance of these developments by founding
the “Workgroup on the Investigation of Energy-related Influences in SPL” in 2014.
It has gathered an extensive and structured collection of relevant works to shed light
on the findings of various groups or organizations as well as on knowledge gaps.
Major results are now published in this book, which, therefore, is also registered as
ASIM Proceedings No. 182. In Part I, the book introduces the approaches to model
energy-related aspects in the simulation of production and logistics systems that are
available today, discusses the construction and application of energy-specific perfor-
mance indicators, and analyzes the input information that needs to be acquired before
implementing suitable models. On this basis, the technical solutions are introduced.
Regarding practical implementation and illustration, Part II of the book is divided
into six chapters, each dedicated to one application field, such as automotive, elec-
tronics, and transportation. In each of these chapters, written by related experts, the
specific performance indicators and required data are introduced, challenges to the
conceptual modeling explained with their solution approaches, and, finally, several
examples given for the application of these approaches. Thus, these chapters can
support the engineers of the related domains for understanding the scope and tasks
for a suitable simulation model, and to achieve an estimate of the effort that it might
require and the benefits it could raise.
The editors express their gratitude to all members of the ASIM working group
for the investigation of energy-related influences in SPL for the many discussions,
the evaluation of numerous articles and papers, and the many years of commitment
to this topic. Special thanks are addressed to the many authors of this book, who
invested huge effort and care to provide the readers with an exciting and informative
experience.