A Decomposition Scheme for Integration of Production Scheduling and Control: Demand Response to Varying Electricity Prices

Abstract

One views demand response in industrial processes as the management of operating policies to accommodate variations in the availability and pricing of electricity from the grid. To find the optimal operating regimes and to facilitate the transitions in between such regimes in a cost-effective manner, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem is often formulated. A full solution to this problem involves not only finding the optimal operating regimes but also determining the optimal control policies to ensure minimal transition costs; such solutions are often mathematically intractable. In this paper, a decomposition strategy is proposed to arrive at a feasible, albeit suboptimal, solution. The scheduling problem is first solved using a prefixed transition time to minimize the total operating cost; only the first scheduled transition of the obtained solution is implemented in the process, and optimization of controller parameters is then carried out to economically shape the transient profiles. When the...