Environmental aspects in manufacturing system modelling and simulation—State of the art and research perspectives

The efficient and effective usage of energy and resources is of rising importance in manufacturing companies. This paper argues that manufacturing system simulation is a promising way to realistically cope with those issues and simultaneously consider them with traditional target dimensions. Against this background, the paper analyses whether commercial simulation tools are already capable to address those aspects. It turns out that environmentally related aspects are currently not sufficiently considered as standard functions. Therefore, based on the analysis of on-going research work, different directions for further development are presented and discussed.