Energy saving by switch-off policy in a pull-controlled production line

The control of the consumption during the machine idle periods can support energy saving policies in manufacturing systems. The strategy to switch-off the machines reducing the energy consumed during the idle periods can lead to important energy saving. This paper proposes an adaptive control strategy to switch off/on the machines of a production line under pull control policy. The controller of each machine uses the information of the downstream buffer and the satisfaction of the customer order to apply the switch-off policy. The numerical evaluation compares the proposed policy with the approaches proposed in literature considering the trade-off between buffer level and energy saving. The simulations test the proposed policy under different demand profiles and production line configurations. The proposed policy reduces the energy consumption without any effect on the customer performance. The production line balanced or the bottleneck in the last machine leads to the better results.