Coordination of multiple production and utility systems in a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game

Abstract Large industrial sites typically consists of multiple production and utility systems. To minimize overall cost, these systems need to coordinate the operation. The problem resulting can be stated as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game. Thus, we propose a method which coordinates the operation across multiple production systems (leaders) and on-site utility systems (followers). The proposed method performs iterative feedback loops between production and utility systems. The coordination between the production and utility systems is performed by load- and time-dependent energy costs. The proposed method is applied to a case study with two production systems and two utility systems. The proposed mathod saves 7.3 % in total cost compared to the common separated and unidirectional optimization between each production system and the corresponding utility system. Thus, in summary, we provide an efficient method to enable cost optimization across multiple production and utility systems to reduce site-wide energy cost.