Energy-intense production-inventory planning with participation in sequential energy markets

To support the uprise of demand response, especially in the context of industrial processes, we propose a new approach to integrally determine the production-inventory plan and the cost-minimizing bids to participate in sequential reserve and energy-only markets. In particular, our approach considers time-coupling constraints which occur in the context of a production-inventory planning problem. We extend this problem with a comprehensive bidding formulation, which allows evaluating revenues and potential cost from the market participation, considering price uncertainties and uncertain activations of committed reserve capacity. This results in a multistage stochastic mixed-integer linear program, which explicitly considers the stage-wise revelation of information in our setup. To illustrate the capabilities of our approach, we apply our model to a real-world case study in which we investigate the participation of a cement plant in the German energy-only and reserve markets. The results of our case study indicate significant revenues for flexible industrial processes when participating in German spot and reserve markets.