Demand Response Control of Beverage Production Plants With Binary Units

This paper explores two main optimal control strategies to utilize the production flexibility potentials of beverage production lines for ancillary service provision. Following incentive-based demand response (DR) programs, beverage production lines can provide system services to the power grids by adapting their power and energy consumption in accordance with grid balancing requirements. Therefore, two algorithmic approaches are developed in this paper. On one side, the first approach addresses the flexibility of production lines in terms of power management, thereby enabling them to participate in DR. The design models of the involved complex machinery resemble extensive measurements from a real-world beverage plant, relating power consumption of the processing units to their processing speed. On the other side, the second algorithm, built upon energy considerations, characterizes optimal flexibility for participation in energy-based DR programs. The existence of binary processing units in the lines results in a set of mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problems in both proposed control algorithms. The algorithms trade off between the economic reward of flexibility provision and reduced production by assigning the processing speed to the units. The paper also introduces power and energy contracts and derives an optimized flexibility graph for the production lines. The proposed methods are investigated through simulations of various ancillary services.