TEEPP – Research in Innovative Technologies for the Optimization of Energy Efficiency in Production Processes

To achieve the optimization of energy efficiency in companies with high consumption in their production processes through industrial research using innovative technologies to study the energy process of the processes, detect and correct anomalies and replan the production process and its products.

Project Description:

The project Research in Innovative Technologies for the Optimization of Energy Efficiency in Production Processes (TEEPP), aims to achieve energy optimization of companies with large energy consumption in their production processes through industrial research for the allocation and optimization of energy costs of each unit produced, using for this purpose innovative technologies for the energy study of processes, detection of anomalies and their correction through maintenance strategies, control and replanning actions of processes and products.

Problem to be solved:

The Industry sector has traditionally been one of the main energy consumers in Spain, being responsible for 31% of the energy consumption in our country (Source: IDAE).

In order to overcome the above needs and problems, companies need to establish a route towards the energy optimization of their processes. This route can be divided into different steps at the top of which will be the optimization, but to get there it is necessary to overcome a series of obstacles.

Pyramid of energy optimization on an industrial scale

From this perspective, for the optimization of an industrial process as a whole, the need arises to create new methods and protocols that allow energy optimization, mainly focused on maintenance actions, process control, energy integration, for which it is necessary to combine the generation of knowledge within the processes themselves (through modeling and simulation) with Industry 4.0 tools and innovative technologies.

Currently the use of Digital Twin, which represents a virtual model of a process, product or service through the information obtained from sensors or automatisms that are fed back through the application of data analysis technologies, allows manufacturers to optimize production, reduce costs and implement continuous improvement processes supporting decision making.

Project Resolution Objectives:

Given the need detected in industrial companies, ITCL Technology Center, as a benchmark in research in Energy Efficiency and Artificial Intelligence in the Autonomous Community of Castilla y León, will propose to investigate technologies that advance regional and national digitization, optimize data information in the field of sustainability and energy efficiency and provide results to companies to improve their business competitiveness.

ITCL will design ad hoc solutions, with flexibility for customization to different situations and business strategies, in order to obtain intelligent tools that integrate new methodologies for industry, modeling and simulation, design of digital twins and artificial intelligence algorithms that allow abstracting the relevant information from the data and put in value the influence of energy in the production process and its economic allocation in the business context, in turn promoting the most effective model of transfer of the designed solutions in different industrial sectors.

Given the increasing amount of data available to obtain the maximum value from them, the knowledge and expertise of ITCL in AI techniques and management of production and energy efficiency, will allow these massive data to be collected, stored and analyzed by specific techniques in order to extract the maximum knowledge from them and offer an optimized value to the organization.

In this sense, the TEEPP project contributes to ITCL’s strategic positioning as a technological leader in modeling systems for energy optimization of production processes, as it has a direct impact on its training and expertise as a technology center, where the work team requires a high level of specialization.

The TEEPP project includes cutting-edge solutions designed and developed by ITCL and CIDAUT, with digital twin solutions and a set of data analysis libraries that will allow selecting features, modeling, detecting faults and patterns, learning, etc … and that will be a demonstrator of integration of various elements that generate information within an industrial plant, studying different cases depending on the production processes of the project, creating tools that allow the comparison between scenarios and decision making at the technical level. And for all this, ITCL will contribute with a specialized technological route, where energy optimization will be a criterion for production planning and where the allocation of its cost, within the economic viability of the process also influences the decision making for the manufacture of products.

TEEPP will also strengthen ITCL in achieving its strategic objectives as a technology center, among them, positioning and technological leadership, consolidating synergies between the participating technology centers, promoting a model of technology transfer of results to the productive fabric of Castilla y León, and above all, strengthening the knowledge of the proposed research technologies in collaboration with companies in the region, obtaining results that position the research system in Castilla y León.

The main advantages of the project are:

Generate synergies between predictive maintenance and energy efficiency.
To use digital twins as tools for continuous improvement from the point of view of maintenance and energy efficiency.
Generate process knowledge for improvement studies (interaction, understanding and learning).
Implement monitoring systems for production processes that serve as early warning of possible anomalies that affect energy consumption and production.

Project Duration:

2021 – 2022

Regional project in cooperation with:

Funded by:

Project co-financed by the Institute for Business Competitiveness of Castilla y León (ICE) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Thematic Objective 1, which seeks to promote technological development, innovation and quality research, through the Call for R&D projects in collaboration between Technology Centers and companies of Castilla y León.