ABSTRACT

Manufacturing companies increasingly face challenges concerning the sustainability of their production facilities. Main contributors to this circumstance are rising energy prices on the one side and increased sensitivity to environmental impact on the other side. Traditionally, the main focus of the management and professionals in the industrial sector was to continuously increase the productivity, reliability, flexibility, and quality of the industrial process. Less emphasis was placed on the energy efficient design of production processes and facilities (Schröter et al. 2009). More recently, however, increasing attention is being paid to the energy efficiency of the production process as well as the environmental performance of the production buildings. Numerous studies explore the potential of certain industry branches in terms of energy and resource efficiency increase (Pardo Martinez 2010, Thollander et al. 2010, Leobner et al. 2011a). To support this rapidly emerging necessity for a comprehensive (both economical and environmental) assessment of industrial buildings, the respective current practices in representation, analysis, and evaluation must be advanced. The present contribution presents a related effort in this direction: a comprehensive computational environment for the integrative assessment of industrial production facilities is envisioned (Info 2011). Following up on previous studies (Dorn et al. 2011, Kovacic et al. 2011), this paper explores the characteristics and systems of such an environment, including relevant entities and their representations, associated data exchange requirements,

and coupled multi-domain modeling and simulation tools. Additionally, illustrative simulation results of two sub-systems are presented.