Production Process Modeling for Demand Side Management

The supply of electricity is growing increasingly dependent on the weather as the share of renewable energies increases. Different measures can nevertheless maintain grid reliability and quality. These include the use of storage technologies, upgrades of the grid and options for responsiveness to supply and demand. This paper focuses on demand side management and the use of flexibility in production processes. First, the framework of Germany’s energy policy is presented and direct and indirect incentives for businesses to seek as well as to provide flexibility capabilities are highlighted. Converting this framework into a mixed integer program leads to multi-objective optimization. The challenge inherent to this method is realistically mapping the different objectives that affect business practices directly and indirectly in a variety of laws. An example is introduced to demonstrate the complexity of the model and examine the energy flexibility. Second, manufacturing companies’ energy efficiency is assessed under the frequently occurring conditions of heavily aggregated energy consumption data and of information with insufficient depth of detail to perform certain analyses, formulate actions or optimize processes. The findings obtained from the energy assessment and energy consumption projections are used to model the production system’s energy efficiency and thus facilitate optimization. Methods of data mining and machine learning are employed to project energy consumption. Aggregated energy consumption data and different production and environmental parameters are used to assess indirectly measured consumers and link projections of energy consumption with the production schedule.