Decentral Energy Control in a Flexible Production to Balance Energy Supply and Demand

A volatile energy supply sector with fluctuating energy prices poses new challenges to sustainable and cost efficient manufacturing. To ensure a stable and cost efficient energy supply in the industrial energy system, energy supply as well as the demand for manufacturing has to be balanced. The goal is to use energy when it is cheap and provide energy or use less energy during periods of high energy prices. Achieving this goal is strongly limited by ensuring the production performance especially the delivery time and the output and depends on the flexibility of the production. While smart grids provide solutions for balancing supply and demand for regional and higher structured energy networks, solutions in an industrial energy environment are missing. This paper presents the ongoing research concerned with the development of a decentral system including methods and control units to autonomous control an industrial energy system with fluctuating prices. The system will ensure production performance while decreasing energy cost through balancing energy demand and supply. For this purpose, the control units will measure the energy available inside the system. This information has to be balanced with the actual production order situation of each single machine. Based on this comparison, the control units will decide autonomously, considering different production relative parameters, to produce or to wait for more, cheaper energy in the network.