Job scheduling under Time-of-Use energy tariffs for sustainable manufacturing: a survey

Abstract

The combined increase of energy demand and environmental pollution on a global scale is forcing a rethinking, in sustainable terms, of energy supply policies and production models. To flatten demand peaks in power plants, energy suppliers adopted pricing policies that stimulate a change in the consumption practices of customers. One example of such policies is the Time-of-Use (TOU)-based tariffs, which encourage electricity usage at off-peak hours using low prices while penalizing peak hours with higher prices. To avoid a sharp rise in energy supply costs, the manufacturing industry must carefully reschedule the production processes, by shifting them toward less expensive periods. TOU-based tariffs impose specific constraints on the completion of the jobs involved in the production processes as well as a partitioning of the time horizon of the production into a set of time slots, whose associated cost becomes part of the optimization objective. In this article, we review the flourishing literature on job scheduling under TOU-based energy tariffs. Our purpose is to provide researchers and practitioners with a framework that may guide them toward the most important theoretical results on the topic as well as the most prominent practical applications in sustainable manufacturing.