This paper presents the short-term hourly scheduling of industrial and commercial customers with cogeneration facilities, conventional power units, and heat-only units. In order to serve the power and heat demands of the customer with minimum cost, demand response (DR) program has been implemented. In the proposed DR program total power and heat demand of customer will be supplied, without any curtailed load. Moreover, the responsive load can vary in different time intervals. In the paper, the heat-power dual dependency characteristic in different types of CHP (combined heat and power generation) units is taken into account and all technical constraints of generation units have been satisfied. In addition, a heat buffer tank, with the ability of heat storage, has been incorporated in the proposed framework. This work studies four cases in order to confirm the performance of the proposed method. The importance of applying the proposed DR program, the effect of considering the amount of transferable power constraint and the effect of heat exchange with the nearby factories in the value of expected profit have been investigated in the case studies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.