A Holistic Framework for Developing Expert Systems to Improve Energy Efficiency in Manufacturing

Amid growing environmental and societal concerns about energy use, companies face increasing pressure to adopt sustainable manufacturing practices. The European Union’s guiding principles, aimed in part at achieving climate neutrality and fostering green growth, underscore the need for systematic, data-driven approaches to energy efficiency. This involves the measurement, monitoring, and analysis of energy data. However, identifying efficiency potentials often relies on expert knowledge, which is becoming increasingly scarce due to skilled labor shortages. Expert systems offer a solution by consolidating and analyzing data to automatically identify energy-saving opportunities. These systems leverage stored expertise, applying it to measurement data to generate actionable insights, while their explicit knowledge representation and transparent reasoning facilitate knowledge transfer. Despite their potential, most expert systems are developed intuitively and tailored to specific applications, limiting their broader adoption. To address this, we propose a holistic framework for systematic expert system development, supported by defined personas and an expert system shell serving as a software template. The framework is demonstrated and evaluated through its application in a metalworking process chain.