A dynamic model for the energy management of microgrid-enabled production systems

In recent years, industrial facilities are devoting ever greater attention to the importance of energy in their operations. It directly supports the challenges of high availability, quality excellence, and compliance with ever more ambitious sustainability targets. Such objectives are often beyond the scope of local electric utilities, and so this work, instead, considers microgrid-enabled production systems. In such a case, the production enterprise is motivated to in-source its energy supply so as to tailor its management and delivery to the needs of its production system. The introduction of microgrids to a production system setting opens several new industrial energy management activities. Here, the microgrid's dynamic power balancing activities in the operations time scale are of greatest importance. The power supply, which may potentially be variable, must be matched to the industrial loads which are a byproduct of production activities. Therefore, this article seeks to develop a Dynamic Energy Management Model for Microgrid-Enabled Production Systems. The model is based on a hetero-functional graph theory rooted in the Axiomatic Design for Large Flexible Engineering Systems and timed Petri nets. The static stability of the microgrid is analyzed using power flow analysis. The resulting model is applied to an illustrative example in which a multi-resource production system is coupled to a microgrid with several types of power generation. The outcomes of the example show that the variable electricity demand imposed by production activities is ill accommodated by renewable energy sources alone. Consequently, the stability of the microgrid is maintained by a dispatchable generator. This holistic model, therefore, includes the impact of the production schedule on greenhouse gas emissions.