• energy
• lyfecicle

The continuously increasing technological development and the corresponding always stricter environmental regulations compel organizations to be efficient and effective not only in terms of a good orientation towards the market needs, but also in regards to political and ethical conformity. Manufacturing enterprises, in particular, have faced the imperative necessity to reduce their energy consumptions (especially those relating to electrical energy), and consequentially their costs. This crucial need has led to the development of a good amount of approaches, all addressed to estimate the energetic expenditure of the main actors in production systems: the machine tools. Unfortunately, the actual methodologies are affected by several problems, regarding their complexity and lack of standardization and, most of all, they are not able to directly connect the energy consumption to its equivalent cost. The approach proposed in the present thesis, therefore, is intended to solve this issue, and to provide a valid and appropriate means for estimating all the negative cash flows related to a machine tool during its whole lifetime. The validity of this solution has been confirmed by the results provided by the phases of implementation and evaluation, where some real data have been imported into the model, proving both the algorithm efficiency and the conceptual reliability. In conclusion, given a specific production scenario, the method is able to express the machine lifecycle costs in relation to the energy requirements associated with its operating modes and production tasks, establishing itself as an effective and real solution for a complete economic evaluation of a machine tool investment.