Manufacturing companies around the world are leveraging data generated from fully-instrumented plants to improve productivity and adjust processes, but also to reduce consumption of key resources such as energy, water and raw materials. The Internet of Things paradigm enables a smarter way to monitor production assets, and wireless networks are critical for implementing advanced sensor architectures to closely monitor key parameters such as temperature, pressure, emissions and vibrations, thus achieving greater control over plants performance and sustainability indicators.

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Substantial energy and resource efficiency improvements are priority requirements for manufacturing industry. Energy costs charged by energy companies fluctuate according to time and consumption peaks; to reduce the energy bill, manufacturing industries need to manage production operations with an energy effective planning to avoid peaks and to perform high consumption operations when the energy cost is cheaper. The need to optimize energy and resource becomes also more critical inside an industrial park, where the energy consumption of the different plants needs balancing to avoid supply shortage.

It is unfeasible of course to drive production only on an energy base, as a plant has usually many other constraints; however, it is quite always possible to tune production to get a better energy efficiency. To get this target it is necessary to correlate precisely energy consumption with production data in order to be able to understand the impact of different steps of execution in term of energy and production.

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On 16-17th February 2017 ACT-OR participated in the 1st AIROYoung workshop "Emerging Optimization Problems on Complex Networks". SYMBIOPTIMA was presented introducing the problem of the optimization of cross-sectorial flows in industrial symbiosis context. ACT-OR highlighted the importance to use reliable optimization tools in industrial cluster in order to increase the wealth related to a symbiotic approach at cluster level and maintain the single company decision autonomy.


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On 31st January 2017, Gr3n recycling and SUPSI organized a workshop on "Circular Economy experiences: sustainable product, process and business models" at SUPSI facilities with the participation of local companies from different sectors (pharmaceutical, chemical, textile, mechanical and consumer goods). The workshop was meant to provide to participants a wider definition of Circular Economy, going beyond the mere recycling concept, and share tools and business models that lead to a redefinition of production processes, products and services, maximizing circular economy impacts.  

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