Demand response for sustainable manufacturing systems considering buffer content utilization

Due to the rapidly rising energy price and increase in public awareness of environmental protection, the manufacturers are facing the ever-increasing moral and economic pressures from the community, government, and society. Hence, the significance of energy related studies in manufacturing systems has gradually become recognized in recent years. In most cases, the techniques to reduce the energy consumption are either renewable energy methods (solar, tidy and wind) or improving energy efficiency for existing energy modes. The approach to cut the energy related costs for manufacturing plants has not been comprehensively considered, although the same methods such as demand response and load shedding have been widely studied in the building research. In this paper, a brief analysis of the unique challenges to the application of the demand response technique in manufacturing systems is presented. The feasibility and profitability of demand response in manufacturing systems under the constraint of system throughput are studied and explored. An initial study about customer side decision making on demand response is introduced, and a numerical case of a section of a manufacturing system is used to show the benefits of the proposed idea, which illustrates over 6% bill reduction and over 5% consumption reduction during a billing cycle without sacrificing system throughput.