Research Motivation

The industrial usage of energy presents unique challenges. Fundamentally, it is contingent upon the products and services it delivers. In the meantime, the trend in recent decades has been towards continually evolving and more competitive marketplaces. In order to stay competitive, industrial companies have had to respond with high variety products of increasingly short product life cycle. The mass-customization and short product life cycle problem has meant that industrial companies with:  Resilient operations will be able to “bounce back” from the shifting fluctuations of customers and suppliers leveraging the ability quickly and incrementally adjust production capacity and capability.  Sustainable operations will systematically control the quantity, timing, and cost of their energy consumption.

We have made contributions in two areas:

For further details, please explore the LIINES Publication Repository. 

Thought Leadership

Towards Multi‐Modal Army Base Energy Management Systems (2020): In this National Academy of Engineering white paper, Prof. Farid articulates how energy management systems can serve to strengthen the resilience of Army base operations and its supply chains.

An Overview of Trends and Developments of Internet of Things Applied to Industrial Systems (2018): Led by Prof. Farid, Dr. Thomas Strasser, and Dr. Pavel Vrba, the IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Industrial Systems provides its take on the development of the Internet of Things in industrial systems. 

Additionally, we have written several blog posts specifically on the topic of Industrial Energy Management @ the LIINES.

Data & Analysis Methods

Measures of Reconfigurability and its Key Characteristics in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (2017): As more fundamental research, this work develops measures of reconfigurability and its key characteristics in industrial operations. These serve as the basis of new developments in enterprise control that directly support reconfigurable operations.

Axiomatic Design of Multi-Agent Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (2015): Building upon the reconfigurability measures, this work develops the first quantitatively architected multi-agent (artificially intelligent) system reference architecture for industrial operation. This a key step to achieving sustainable, resilient, and reconfigurable operation.

A Dynamic Model for the Energy Management of Microgrid-Enabled Production Systems (2017): Building upon our electrified transportation systems research and developments in hetero-functional graph theory, this work presents microgrid-enabled production systems as a pathway to zero carbon manufacturing systems.

Dynamic Production System Model for Industrial Energy Management (2015): Rather than treating industrial energy consumption in a static fashion, this work treats energy consumption dynamically as part of the utilization of the bill of material in production system operations.

Additionally, we have written several blog posts specifically on the topic of Industrial Energy Management @ the LIINES.