STAY FLEXIBLE: A PRESCRIPTIVE PROCESS MONITORING APPROACH FOR ENERGY FLEXIBILITY-ORIENTED PROCESS SCHEDULES Research Paper

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources poses major challenges for balancing increasingly weather-dependent energy supply and demand. Demand-side energy flexibility, offered particularly by companies, is seen as a promising and necessary approach to address these challenges. Process mining provides significant potential to prevent a deterioration of product quality or process flows due to flexibilization and allows for exploiting monetary benefits associated with flexible process operation. Hence, we follow the design science research paradigm to develop PM4Flex, a prescriptive process monitoring approach, that generates recommendations for pending process flows optimized under fluctuating power prices by implementing established energy flexibility measures. Thereby, we consider company-and process-specific constraints as well as historic event logs. We demonstrate and evaluate PM4Flex by implementing it as a software prototype and applying it to exemplary data from a heating and air conditioning company, observing considerable cost savings of 1.56ct per kWh or 34.35%.