Energy Awareness in Production Scheduling
To reduce electrical demand, companies normally invest in new technologies and
processes. However, with intelligent scheduling it is possible to reduce energy
demand and costs without losing productivity. Moreover, scheduling has two major
advantages: firstly, no high investments are necessary and secondly, it can be
implemented immediately.
Overall, three different approaches can be identified:
- The energy consumption can be reduced by specific planning,
- time-dependent electricity cost might be exploited or
- peak power may be decreased.
The assorted characteristics and interdependencies of these approaches are examined. Initially the investigations are based on mathematical programming. Given the highly complex nature of such scheduling problems, efficient heuristics as iterated local search and genetic algorithm in particular are used to solve these problems.
Key Words
Production Scheduling, Sustainable Manufacturing, Hybrid Flow Shop, Mixed Integer Programming, Energy-Awareness
Duration
Since October 2015