Energy Demand Response of Process Systems through Production Scheduling and Control

Demand response has become a topic of significant research, development, and deployment over the last few years. The energy demand management is a critical task in industrial process systems for the potential benefits to be realized by promoting the interaction and responsiveness of process operation. However, the dynamic behavior, especially transition trajectories, of the underlying process is seldom taken into account during this task. Furthermore, the incorporation of energy constraints related to electricity pricing and availability is one of the key challenges in this process. The purpose of this study is thus to present a novel optimization formulation for energy demand management in dynamic process systems that takes transition behavior and cost explicitly into account, while simultaneously handling time-sensitive electricity prices. This is accomplished by bringing together production scheduling and transition control through a real-time optimization framework. The dynamic formulation is cast as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem and demonstrated using a continuous stirred tank reactor example where the energy required is assumed to be roughly proportional to the material flow.