An Evolutionary Optimisation for Electric Price Responsive Manufacturing
Abstract
With an increased amount of energy provision through volatile energy sources such as wind turbines, time dependent pricing of electricity will gain importance and have an impact on overall energy costs, especially for large consumers such as manufacturing plants. Following the supply of electricity, energy prices, too, will vary greatly, and will be known only a short time in advance. Therefore, in future electricity markets, price-based scheduling of manufacturing activities can be used to maintain or increase cost efficiency of manufacturing processes. Taking short-time price projections into account, the industry can adapt its production schedule to the availability of low priced energy. Software applications taking into account process models and short-time price projections, can serve to compare alternative production plans and identify efficient configurations with respect to all relevant interdependencies. In this paper, we present an approach how to find the most cost-efficient production schedule using an optimisation based on a highly flexible process metamodel.