Simulation for Sustainable Manufacturing System Considering Productivity and Energy Consumption

Managing energy consumption of manufacturing systems has become immediately necessary because electricity consumption has become severely restricted in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011. Moreover the energy conservation law has been revised in Japan in April, 2010. This law requires management of the energy consumption and reinforces the regulation to reduce more than one percentage of the previous year's energy consumption per unit of production throughput. Manufacturing system simulations to evaluate productivity have often been used when designing and improving sustainable manufacturing systems. However, manufacturing system simulations to evaluate energy consumption per unit of production throughput and the amount of energy consumption have not been proposed. The purpose of our research is to establish a simulation environment for sustainable manufacturing systems considering the productivity and energy consumption. We also propose an implementation for the simulation environment. A case study for a middle-scale semiconductor manufacturing line is carried out to confirm the efficiency of our proposed simulation environment.