Improving energy efficiency in the production floor using SoA-based monitoring techniques

Modern manufacturing systems are struggling to remain competitive under the pressures of and increasingly demanding society. The advent of SoA-based production systems is presented as the solution to facing those difficulties. In order to support this new production paradigm, new tools have to be developed for the benefit of the production engineers of who will be implementing and deploying the SoA-based factory floor. This entails the development of Smart Devices, which while being autonomous are able to communicate and cooperate in an open and standardized way with other participants in the production system. These capabilities can be exploited in order to implement a next-generation production monitoring system that is not only able to monitor production status, but also energy usage, eventually leading to much greener and more efficient factories. © 2010 Springer Berlin Heidelberg..