Energy-efficient control in a two-stage production line with parallel machines

The energy saving topic is becoming increasingly important in industry: environmental impact and sustainability of processes are, nowadays, considered critical factors for this field. Manufacturing processes sustainability can be improved by controlling machine state with energy-efficient control policies that switch off/on the device. This approach can be also applied to a workstation composed of parallel and identical machines. This work is focused on this type of configuration, presenting a novel model to identify energy-efficient control policies for two-stage production line with parallel and identical machines. The proposed model reduces energy consumption while assuring a target level on production performance indicators. Numerical results confirm model effectiveness and benefits when implemented on general cases of production systems.