Abstract
Electricity cost is one of main production costs for flow shops. Providing frequency regulation services can help electric loads reduce their electricity costs. Previous studies mostly focus on automatic generation control (AGC) strategies for other types of electric loads, such as air conditioners, EVs or battery storage. In this paper, we find flow shops competent to follow regulation signals and avoid interrupts of processing with the help of scheduling optimization. This finding may be an aid for flow shops by availing regulation services to the market and making a profit. Hence, we propose an AGC strategy for optimizing flow shop scheduling, without affecting the operation. To formulate the bidding strategy for flow shops in regulation market, we considered as many relevant factors as possible, including the regulation performance and yield of flow shops, constraints on load power, regulation reserve capacity and machines operation, inventory of each semi-finished product, AGC strategy—as well as the coupling between the bids in both energy market and regulation market. Our case study shows the potential of the methodology proposed in this paper to cut down the electric cost of flow shops and supplies of performance-qualified frequency regulation service.