Profit Maximization of a Power Plant

This paper addresses the problem of profit maximization of a power plant by utilizing three different fuel systems in an optimal manner. Pontryagin’s maximum principle is used to derive properties of the optimal control strategy. These properties give rise to a switching function. Subsequently, certain heuristics are introduced and used in combination with discrete optimization to obtain an initial trajectory of the switching function. An iterative procedure is proposed, which uses the initial trajectory for the computation of the optimal control strategy. The control strategy derived is a combination of a state feedback and time-varying feedforward term. Its performance is tested against input noise.