Comparative analysis of the impact of energy-aware scheduling, renewable energy generation, and battery energy storage on production scheduling

To make manufacturing systems more energy cost-efficient, significant research proposes adopting energy--aware production scheduling with on-site renewable energy generation systems and battery energy storage systems. Depending on the different system configurations and various practical scenarios, the effect of those proposals would vary on energy efficiency and time-related performance of the system because of the complex dynamics and trade-offs in the manufacturing process. This paper proposes a mathematical optimization-based systematic approach to comprehensively evaluate and analyze the effect on energy cost and makespan by energy-aware production scheduling, on-site solar power generation, and battery energy storage in various configurations. Numerical experiments are designed to demonstrate how the presented optimization models can be used to investigate the cost-saving and performance degradation that results from different configurations. Based on our numerical experiment, using only energy-aware scheduling can reduce the energy cost by 23% and the total cost by 7%. Simultaneous use of all three efforts saves 36% of energy cost and 15% of the total cost, which comprises the energy and time-related makespan costs. A sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the practical benefits of renewable energy generation and battery energy storage under different generation and storage capacities.