Economic batch sizing and scheduling on parallel machines under time-of-use electricity pricing

Time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing provides new opportunity for power-intensive users to reduce their electricity costs. In order to achieve optimal economic scheduling under TOU pricing for batch production, there are difficulties existed because batch production loads are not fixed or directly adjustable but closely related with time and machine dependant production schedule. Provided that production capacity is abundant and minimizing makespan is not the primary target, a MILP model that integrates batch sizing and scheduling on parallel machines is proposed, in which the objective is to minimize electricity costs in production by utilizing TOU pricing. Use cases are provided to assess the proposed model, experimental results show that the proposed model reduce electricity costs significantly, and promote peak load regulation of power grid.