Economic MPC Optimization of a cold production plant with energy storage

This article presents the economic optimization of a refrigeration energy supply system based on air-cooled water chillers, to which an energy storage system (TES) has been added. This is to satisfy the cold demand of a large facility. The modelling of each of the elements has been integrated into Simulink and Simscape in order to be able to simulate the complete plant. It has been assumed that the system is controlled at low level, in such a way that is capable of receiving flow and temperature references from an optimizer placed hierarchically on a higher level. Finally, a non-convex mixed-integer optimization problem has been proposed with continuous and binary variables associated to the operation of parts of the facility, so that the economic cost of cold generation is optimized. Simulation results that support the good performance of the optimizer are presented.