Defrost Period Allocation with Flexible Intervals via Group Role Assignment
Fu-Yan Wen, Haibin Zhu, Dongning Liu · 2022 IEEE 25th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD) · 2022
Timing hot gas defrosting is one of the commonly used methods of cold storage defrosting, it only needs to determine the time period interval and duration. However, this method is difficult to arrange a reasonable defrost time period according to the different power of the air cooler and the type of industrial power time period, resulting in a waste of electricity. Thereby, this paper tackle this issue using the Group Role Assignment (GRA) model to formalize the defrosting period allocation with flexible intervals problem (DPFI) of the air cooler. On the one hand, it innovatively uses periods instead of discrete individuals as agents for the allocation of defrosting periods. On the other hand, according to the actual frosting situation of the air cooler, different period intervals are adopted to defrost the air cooler. The focus of this article is to express the defrosting period interval constraint linearly. The formalization of GRA makes it easy to find a solution through integer programming (IP) using the PuLP package of Python. Large-scale simulation experiments verify the robustness and practicability of the proposed method. In addition, by comparing the power cost of defrosting at different period intervals and the same period interval, simulation experiments show that using flexible period intervals to defrost the air cooler can significantly reduce the power cost of defrosting.