FlexPress – An Implementation of Energy Flexibility at Shop-Floor Level for Compressed Air Applications

One of the biggest challenges with the growing amount of renewable energy generation is the fluctuation in energy supply. In the case of Germany, renewable and volatile energy resources (wind and solar) are expanded. Industrial demand-side management, therefore, plays an important role for the automotive industry in Germany with its high energy demand. For a sustainable production manufacturing processes need to be more energy efficient and adaptable to volatile supply. The main goal is to synchronize manufacturing processes and their energy consumption with energy supply. While there are holistic concepts and ideas for a service-oriented platform for energy flexibility, a defined workflow for implementing energy flexibility signals at the shop-floor level is still missing. Our work proposes a method to adapt manufacturing processes with consideration to energy flexibility. The presented method aggregates data from a manufacturing process. Therefore, sensor data interoperates with flexibility signals on the shop-floor level where an intelligent controller can set process parameters by communicating through an OPC UA Server with the PLC. As an important cross-sectoral technology in the automotive industry, flexible compressed air is used for the validation of the presented method.