Applications of an integrated manufacturing planning and control system for facilities in a deregulated energy market

An integrated Manufacturing Planning and Control (MPC) system that can help facilities reduce their costs in the deregulated energy market and in a stricter environmental scenario is presented in this paper. The functions of this system are to quantify the cost of energy usage and waste disposal that would result from a given production schedule and help decide how to reduce these costs. The main focus of this paper is in two functions of the energy module that would apply to facilities under a Real-Time Pricing (RTP) tariff: (a) management of energy suppliers and (b) modifications to the production schedule. The final section of the paper presents an overview of the results obtained from several solution methods that were studied and developed for these functions of the integrated MPC.