An Advanced Decision Support Platform in Energy Management to Increase Energy Efficiency for Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

The paper presents a new vision on the energy consumption management in the case of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs), integrated into an advanced decision support platform, with technical and economic benefits on increasing the energy efficiency, with four modules for database management, profiling, forecasting, and production scheduling. Inside each module, artificial intelligence and data mining techniques were proposed to remove the uncertainties regarding the dynamic of technological flows. Thus, the data management module includes the data mining techniques, that extract the technical details on the energy consumption needed in the development of production scheduling strategies, the profiling module uses an original approach based on clustering techniques to determine the typical energy consumption profiles required in the optimal planning of the activities, the forecasting module contains a new approach based on an expert system to forecast the total energy consumption of the SMEs, and production scheduling module integrates a heuristic optimization method to obtain the optimal solutions in flattening the energy consumption profile. The testing was done for a small enterprise from Romania, belonging to the domain of trade and repair of vehicles. The obtained results highlighted the advantages of the proposed decision support platform on the decrease in the intensity of energy consumption per unit of product, reduction of the purchase costs, and modification of the impact for which energy bills have on the operational costs.

Energy Efficiency Policies for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: A Review

“…It is possible to find information about general policies on SMEs (or with a partial focus on SMEs' general energy efficiency policies) in some countries such as Sweden [107], Japan [42], Portugal [102], Bulgaria [157], China [78], the U.S. [114,115], Germany [84,158], the Netherlands [159], Lithuania [99], and Vietnam [160], and at regional level [161]. In addition, the analyses have focused on macrosectors (generally, manufacturing SMEs in Italy [93], Slovenia [162], Belgium [73], Spain [75], or Turkey [163]) or on specific sectors from a comprehensive environmental perspective (the UK [111], Mexico [101], Romania [133,164], Venezuela [165], Sri Lanka [166], Jordan [167], Iran [168], Pakistan [169], Vietnam [170], Ghana, and Senegal [171]).…”

“…Energy management systems are not yet widespread among EU SMEs [128]. Some reviews cover the implementation of EnMS in SMEs at the global level [16,34,129], highlighting that energy management standards (mainly ISO 50001) are often too complex for a costeffective implementation at the SME level (for non-energy-intensive companies [130]) and alternative tools for energy management should be tailored to SMEs (i.e., networks [109], inhouse tools [131], plan-do-check-act cycle tools [132], integrated decision support systems tools [133], or external support [134]). Hence, their implementation in SMEs in simplified forms should be taken into consideration by policymakers.…”