Electrical load schedule optimization for manufacturing plants

Energy usage is one of the inevitable operation costs in industrial production. In order to prevent large expense on energy, several approaches have been proposed for the manufacture plants in the past decades, one of which is through load management, that is, carefully scheduling operation hours of devices to minimize the electricity cost based on the volatile electricity price offered by the utility and their production process. With this approach, manufacturing plants do not reduce the electrical consumption, but reduce energy cost. In the paper, we apply evolutionary strategy to the electric load management to search for an optimal schedule of devices without adversely affecting production. A software application has been developed to compute optimal schedule for a given load.