SPEAR is a pan-European research project, which proudly bears the ITEA label. The consortium consists of 26 partners from six European countries. As the name dictates, SPEAR aims to spawn ground-breaking research results and prototypes for energy optimisation in industrial production processes.

SPEAR is a pan-European research project, which proudly bears the ITEA label. The consortium consists of 26 partners from six European countries. As the name dictates, SPEAR aims to spawn ground-breaking research results and prototypes for energy optimisation in industrial production processes.

SPEAR’s heart is an extremely flexible and highly generic optimisation platform. This platform will host a comprehensive set of optimisation algorithms – each one facilitating an effective and profitable energy optimisation of highly complex production processes. SPEAR will not focus on isolated industry sectors, rather, a broad spectrum of application domains like production processes in common plants, production lines, buildings, hybrid drives, and wind turbine drive trains will be supported. Moreover, the energy-specific optimisation of existing and new production plants during virtual commissioning and during the running production will be supported.

SPEAR will overcome available approaches by means of a unique mechanism. Instead of using estimated or abbreviated models for the simulation-based optimisation, our solution will engage the real device-provided simulation models in order to produce highly accurate forecasts for the energy consumption of industrial production processes. The accuracy of these forecasts will enable an optimisation that has to find its match.

Goals

• Create an extendable platform for energy and efficiency optimizations of production systems
• Usable as a local or cloud based application
• Adapt the energy usage of the production system to the current energy supply
• Upgrade classic production system to cyber physical production systems to allow measurement of signals
• SPEAR integrates physical models to calculate the energy demand instead of using cost-intensive sensors to measure it Create a simulation of the production system to predict current and future energy costs of components
• Simulates the energy usage in real time on low-cost hardware
• Allows prediction of the energy usage of components over time
• Permanently update the simulation system with the cyber physical measurements
• The software to connect the simulation and the real production systems signals will be Open Source
• Create an extendable library of optimization methods
• Can be extended independently of the optimization platform