Planning the production of a fleet of domestic combined heat and power generators

This paper describes a planning problem, arising in the energy supply chain, that deals with the planning of the production runs of micro combined heat and power (microCHP) appliances installed in houses, cooperating in a fleet. Two types of this problem are described. The first one is the Single House Planning Problem (SHPP), where the focus is on supplying heat in the household. The second one combines many microCHPs into a Fleet Planning Problem (FPP) and focuses on the mutual electricity output, while still considering the local heat demand in the individual households. The problem is modeled as an ILP. For practical use a local search method is developed for the FPP, based on a dynamic programming formulation of the SHPP.