A Family of Resource Constraints for Energy Cost Aware Scheduling

We present a family of resource constraints which allow us to model scheduling problems with time variable resource cost. Our main use case is energy cost minimization, by avoiding peak electricity usage periods in the generated schedule. This at the same time helps to balance the overall demand profile, leading to reduced stress on the national electricity grid. The proposed constraints extend existing cumulative, disjunctive and machine choice constraints. We present abstract formulations of the constraints, some efficient models for cost estimation and describe algorithms for domain pruning based on reduced cost reasoning.