Scheduling and energy - Industrial challenges and opportunities

Recent developments in energy markets, such as the increasing share of inherently volatile renewable power in the energy supply mix and the need of reducing carbon emissions while improving the production efficiency, make the operating environment of process industries more dynamic and complex. At the same time, continued advances in the mathematical programming and IT technologies open up new opportunities to tackle the related operational scheduling problems in a more integrated way at an ever larger scale. This paper discusses the industrial challenges arising from the deregulation of the electricity markets and stronger presence of unpredictable renewable energy sources. It gives a brief overview of methods currently available followed by set of real industrial case studies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and opportunities relevant to the presented examples.