Optimal production planning of a power plant

This paper addresses the problem of planning the usage of actuators optimally in an economic perspective. The objective is to maximize the profit of operating a given plant during 24 hours of operation. Models of two business objectives are formulated in terms of system states and the monetary value of these objectives is established. Based on these and the cost of using the different actuators a profit function has been formulated. The optimization of the profit is formulated as an optimal control problem where the constraints include the dynamics of the plant as well as a requirement to reference tracking. A power plant is considered in this paper, where the fuel system consists of three different fuels; coal, gas, and oil.