Rabe, M.; von Viebahn, C.; Straßburger, S.; Wenzel, S. (Hrsg.: Energy-related Material Flow Simulation in Production and Logistics. Cham: Springer International, 2024.

Since the beginning of the industrialization, engineers have aimed to increase productivity and reduce costs. In the last decades, customer orientation has steadily gained importance and, thus, short and reliable delivery times have become a competing target, combined with a trend to mass customization. Currently, however, sustainability aspects are moving into the focus of cus-tomers and enterprises. With respect to production and logistics tasks, this mainly affects the consumption of energy and, in consequence, the emission of greenhouse gas (GHG). This trend is amplified by the dramatic increase of energy costs after the outbreak of the war towards Ukraine, and mirrored by national and international taxes and regulations, such as the European Sus-tainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). The scheduled Corporate Sustainabil-ity Reporting Directive (CSRD) will have distinct implications on the annual audit and liquidity of the company. Methodologies to face these challenges range from the specific acquisition of data on energy consumption via the allocation on the particular production processes and the experimental planning of improvement up to simulation of how to integrate an increasing percentage of renewable energy into current production and logistics processes. The use cases of the book promote to ap-ply methodologies that help to comply with these upcoming challenges. First applications of material flow simulation have already been reported since about 50 years. In the last 40 years, simulation has been successfully in-troduced to analyze and improve first the material flow and later the related information flow, enabling engineers to gain deep insights into the behavior of complex modern production and logistics systems. Sometimes, energy-related aspects have been considered, but in most cases indirectly, e.g., reduc-ing the runtime of equipment and only by this measure decreasing the energy consumption. However, the importance of respecting energy in the processes has become more and more important, and the pressure to reduce the envi-ronmental footprint of production and logistics systems will intensify in the upcoming decade. Therefore, enterprises have started to integrate their con-sumption of energy into their planning processes much more frequently than before, even constructing feedback loops, e.g., from energy control to produc-tion control. This receives additional attention for the increasing use of re-newable, but less reliable, energy sources. Care must be taken to establish processes that aim to use energy when it is available. As an example, many industrial processes like melting or coating have significant energy demands, but could vary the point of time of its consumption within specific limits, leading to a very high complexity. Simulation is the technology of choice for such complex interconnected systems. Nevertheless, there is no satisfying overview on the current ap-proaches and applications of considering energy for production and logistics simulation. The Section “Simulation in Production and Logistics (SPL)” of the association for simulation in the German-speaking area (Germany, Switzer-land, and Austria) (ASIM), responded to the importance of these develop-ments by founding the “Workgroup on the Investigation of Energy-related In-fluences in SPL” in 2014. It has gathered an extensive and structured collec-tion of relevant works to shed light on findings of various groups or organiza-tions as well as on knowledge gaps. Major results are now published in this book, which, therefore, is also registered as ASIM Proceedings No. 182. In its first part it introduces the approaches to model energy-related aspects in the simulation for production and logistics systems that are available today, dis-cusses the construction and application of energy-specific performance indi-cators and analyses the input information that needs to be acquired before implementing suitable models. On this basis, the technical solutions are intro-duced. For the practical implementation and illustration, the second part of the book is divided into six chapters, each dedicated to one application field, such as automotive, electronics, or transportation. In each of these chapters, written by related experts, the specific performance indicators and required data are introduced, challenges to the conceptual modeling explained with their solution approaches, and, finally, several examples given for the appli-cation of these approaches. Thus, these chapters can support the engineers of the related domains to understand the scope and tasks for a suitable simula-tion model, and to achieve an estimate of the effort that it might require and the benefits it could raise. The editors express their gratitude to all members of the ASIM working group for the investigation of energy-related influences in SPL for the many discussions, the evaluation of numerous articles and papers, and the many years of commitment