The Visual MESATM energy management applications suite is configured to work autonomously, gathering, and processing the necessary forecasts of the external variables—such as fuel/power price projections and weather forecasts -, executing calculations, historizing key performance indicators, producing and distributing the resulting reports. These can run as open loop or closed loop actions, depending on whether targets generated from the schedule are to be automatically passed from the scheduler to the optimizer and, from there, to be manually implemented by the Operators or flowing down to the Advanced Process Control (APC) or basic control layer.
Consistency among the decisions systems at different time scales, optimizing in real time but accounting for the constraints imposed by the optimal schedule is guaranteed. Consequently, overall cost and GHGs emissions can be substantially reduced with the help of a real-time, model based Digital Twin approach.