BI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF SINGLE-MACHINE BATCH SCHEDULING UNDER TIME-OF-USE ELECTRICITY PRICES.

Time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing has been a common practice to enhance the peak load regulation capability of power grid. Meanwhile, it provides a good opportunity for industries to reduce energy costs, especially for energy-intensive ones, where batch scheduling is often involved. Majority of batch scheduling problems have been proved to be NP-hard, even for most single-machine environments. Optimizing batch scheduling under TOU policy in these industries will be of great significance. Singlemachine batch scheduling is an important basis for more complicated shop scheduling problems. This paper investigates a bi-objective single-machine batch scheduling problem under TOU policy: the first objective is to minimize the makespan and the second is to minimize the total electricity costs. The considered problem is first formulated as a bi-objective mix-integer linear programming (MILP) model and is demonstrated to be NP-hard. Subsequently, the MILP is simplified by analyzing properties and search space for a Pareto optimal solution is greatly reduced. Then, an exact ε-constraint method is adapted to obtain its Pareto front, which is accelerated due to these properties. Finally, a preferable solution is recommended for decision makers via a fuzzy-logic-based approach. Computational results on randomly generated instances show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]