Energy efficient scheduling with penalty costs, labor costs and volatile electricity prices

Abstract

Manufacturing sector is consuming the high amount of energy at a rapid pace which is leading to energy crisis as well as affecting the environment by the emission of carbon footprints. So, there is a practical interest and necessity to reduce the greenhouse gases and use the energy efficiently. Production scheduling techniques has been in practice from many decades in order to minimize the overall cost involved in the production and use the resources effectively. In the recent times energy efficient scheduling technique has come into use where the major goal is reducing the energy usage involved in the production which would ultimately reduce the overall production cost. Utility companies implement various policies like time of use, real time pricing, critical time pricing, seasonal pricing etc., based on the firms which could be taken advantage of in order to use the energy efficiently. In this energy efficient scheduling the jobs were scheduling on the machines during the low pricing periods with minimum effect on the due dates as well as the labor costs. A mathematical model was proposed in this research which minimize the overall production costs which includes electricity consumption charge, demand charge, penalty costs and labor costs. The validation of the proposed model is verified using various case studies and the results have proven the inclusion of the penalty costs and labors costs would reduce the overall costs incurred.