Material flow optimization under aspects of energy efficiency

The keywords Green IT and Green Computing indicate a paradigm shift of computing. Development of existing and new technology should no longer proceed at the expense of environment. This is also true for automation. Nowadays, one important goal of automation is to optimize the complete work and material flow under the essential constraints of energy consumption, quality and throughput. As a matter of fact, the whole control process should be flexible and reconfigurable which targets the three levels of the control pyramid (ERP, MES, Field). In the context of our ongoing research project LK³S an agent platform is under construction which enables optimization and flexibility. Since the agent platform needs full access to all field level information a new concept of this part is needed. Inspired by concepts of design and implementation of embedded systems a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for the lowest level of the control pyramid has been developed which consists of a set of modules. This paper discusses how this concept can be used to optimize the whole system with respect to the constraints of energy consumption and throughput.