Due to rapid consumption of world’s fossil fuel resources and impracticality of large-scale application and production of renewable energy, the significance of energy efficiency improvement of current available energy modes has been widely realized by both industry and academia. A great deal of research has been implemented to identify, model, estimate, and optimize energy efficiency of single-machine manufacturing system [1–5], but very little work has been done towards achieving the optimal energy efficiency for a typical manufacturing system with multiple machines. In this paper, we analyze the opportunity of energy saving on the system level and propose a new approach to improve energy efficiency for sustainable production systems considering the fact that more and more modern machines have multiple power states. Numerical case based on simulation model of an automotive assembly line is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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