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Actemium is a global industrial services brand within VINCI Energies, operating as a decentralized network of more than 440 autonomous business units worldwide. This structure enables Actemium teams around the world to innovate locally while applying deep engineering expertise across industries, such as manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure.
- Reduce energy intensity of large‑scale industrial refrigeration systems for frozen food manufacturer
- Improve performance visibility across multiple refrigeration plants
- Address industry-wide skill gap among workers
- Meet rising production demand while achieving sustainability targets
- Optimize equipment performance without relying on manual operator intervention
- Built a customized AI-application for refrigeration optimization on PlantPAx® to autonomously evaluate, and select the most energy‑efficient equipment configuration in real time
- Increased energy efficiency by 20%
- Achieved ~17% energy savings, translating to ~$130,000 in projected annual cost savings per site
- Reduced strain on refrigeration equipment
- Provided foundation for scalable deployment across refrigeration plants with consistent KPI visibility
- Established industry-wide operational model of energy‑based equipment ranking running continuously without operator intervention
Challenge
Prioritizing Energy as a Control Variable
Industrial refrigeration is essential to frozen‑food manufacturing, and also one of the most energy‑intensive systems in a plant. In some facilities, refrigeration can account for up to 70% of total electricity use, directly impacting operating costs and greenhouse‑gas emissions.
For a large French-fry manufacturer operating a fleet of refrigeration plants, the challenge went beyond energy alone. The company needed better visibility into system performance across sites. The company also needed to address a growing skills gap in the refrigeration workforce. As experienced technicians retired faster than new ones entered the field, maintaining and optimizing these complex systems has become difficult.
Historically, refrigeration equipment was ranked and operated using conventional lead‑lag logic, focused on maintaining cooling demand, not energy efficiency. While operators could manage major changes, they simply didn’t have the time or tools to continuously evaluate subtle performance shifts or calculate which combination of compressors, condensers, and evaporators delivered the best coefficient of performance (COP), the measure of efficiency in a refrigeration system.
The manufacturer turned to their longstanding automation innovation partner, Actemium, a member of the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork™.
Solution
Autonomous Energy Optimization with PlantPAx®
To address these challenges, Actemium developed RtCOP, an AI-application for refrigeration optimization. Built on PlantPAx®, RtCOP is designed to continuously select the most energy‑efficient operating configuration, automatically and at scale.
RtCOP acts like a virtual operator running 24/7. The application continuously evaluates every possible combination of compressors, condensers, and evaporators, calculating the COP for each scenario in real time. When a more efficient configuration is identified, the system adjusts equipment operation, turning assets on or off and optimizing variable‑speed devices, then repeats the process continuously.
PlantPAx® provided the processing speed, memory, and transparency needed to support this math‑intensive application. Rather than relying on a black‑box approach, Actemium built RtCOP within a modern DCS framework that supports structured text, ladder logic, and modular add‑on instructions. This approach makes the solution scalable, explainable, and supports the digital transformation that the manufacturer needed to prioritize.
Result
Lower Energy Use, Higher Efficiency Scalable Impact
Early results from the first RtCOP deployment were immediate and compelling. The French fry manufacturer achieved a 20% increase in COP, translating to approximately 17% energy savings. On an annual basis, this improvement represented around $130,000 in cost savings per facility, while also reducing environmental impact.
Beyond energy savings, the optimized operation reduced strain on refrigeration assets, improving reliability and long‑term equipment health. As Rosaline Antoun, Product Manager at Actemium, noted, “By increasing efficiency, you’re decreasing the strain on the equipment itself, which makes the entire system more reliable.”
Perhaps most importantly, RtCOP introduced a new operational model for the refrigeration industry as a whole: energy‑based equipment ranking performed autonomously, continuously, and consistently. This is something human operators simply cannot do in real time.
With successful deployments underway, the solution is now being scaled across the customer’s full fleet of refrigeration plants, with KPI dashboards enabling performance comparison from site to site. As Jim summarizes, RtCOP is not just a project outcome, but a product: “We see this as something that can work across plants, across sites, and eventually across the industry.”
Published May 11, 2026