Demand Response Scheduling in Production Lines Constrained by Available Power

Energy efficiency in factories is a new paradigm arising with automatic Demand Response (DR) protocols like OpenADR that enables energy providers to ask their clients to reduce their power consumption for a given time. DR is used to smooth peaks of energy demand at country level by energy providers and the clients get paid for not consuming. Upon reception of a DR, a client should decide in a bounded time if he agrees on DR and for how long. In this paper, we characterize a DR scheduling problem for a production line with available power constraint. Our objective is to respect the DR constraint in a way that its impact on production rate (number of finished items per time unit) is limited as much as possible. To do so, we first propose a scheduling algorithm based on an exhaustive search approach to find an optimal schedule. As complexity of this approach is high, we then develop a heuristic approach based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to find sub-optimal solutions. We conduct simulations to compare performances of the two approaches in terms of production rate, run time and monetary gain.