E²-Design

Energy and resources form the essential basis for the producing economy as well as for a consuming society. Therefore, the competitiveness of manufacturing companies is always closely linked to the availability and demand for energy and raw materials. Declining reserves of fossil fuel, the global rising of energy demand and a likewise sharp rise in global demand for fossil and renewable resources are thus increasingly confronting companies with economic challenges.

Over the past years, the companie's view have changed and ecological goals are increasingly being anchored within the corporate strategies. In doing so, companies not only deal with the energy efficiency of goods that are produced, but also with the energy efficiency potential of their value-adding activities in production and logistics. During the last decade, initial research work and developments have already taken place in the fields of energetic evaluation and alignment of production and logistics processes. However the gained results are only partially implemented into company practice.

The project partners are anticipating to approach these challenges and to provide future users with manageable methods and tools for evaluating energy efficiency in production and logistics scenarios and for optimizing the energy requirments across the entire supply chain.

The main goal of the E²-Design project is to enable companies to take energy efficiency into account as a further target parameter and consider it appropriately in the strategic and tactical planning phase of value-added networks in addition to the classic performance and cost parameters. To this end, a construction kit for the energy-efficient design of production and logistics networks is to be developed and made accessible to the general public.

By transfering the results archived in the research project into practice, a contribution to improving energy efficiency in production and logistics and thus saving final energy in Germany is to be achieved in the medium to long term.

The bundled research results (e.g. gidelines, methods, process modells, IT-demonstrators) are to be used cooperatively by operators of big production networks (usually large companies) and by the kmUs integrated into these networks in order to optimise energy efficiency across the entire supply chain. The results of the research project should thus, for example, favour an energy-optimised choice of location or selection of energy-saving supply strategies and modes of transport in the network and thus bring about a significant reduction in energy consumption in the production of more complex goods in Germany.

• Behr-Hella Thermocontrol GmbH
• LogProIT GmbH
  
• thyssenkrupp Materials Services GmbH