Formalization and Solution Algorithms for Electricity Production Scheduling Problem

This paper belongs to a research cycle conducted by the authors in the sphere of “industrial mathematics”. The whole research is intended to find simple and clear mathematical problem settings for typical management cases for enterprises of basic heavy industries. The major part of industrial management tasks are associated with planning or scheduling problems which on the one hand define enterprises’ everyday activities and guarantee their stable functioning that meets all applied constraints and on the other hand must provide some kind of optimization from economy point of view. This particular paper considers the production scheduling problem for an energy generating enterprise. A problem setting for minimization of fuel consumption of generating assets is formalized. The authors propose a solution based on the combinatorial set of linear programming problems that is inherited from the piecewise linear approximation of assets physical characteristics. The designed approach allows to solve effective production scheduling cases utilizing standard available IT facilities of an average energy generating company.