The energy scheduling problem: Industrial case-study and constraint propagation techniques

This paper deals with production scheduling involving energy constraints, typically electrical energy. We start by an industrial case-study for which we propose a two-step integer/constraint programming method. From the industrial problem we derive a generic problem, the Energy Scheduling Problem (EnSP). We propose an extension of specific resource constraint propagation techniques to efficiently prune the search space for EnSP solving. We also present a branching scheme to solve the problem via tree search. Finally, computational results are provided.