Resumen

RIOS MERCADO, Roger Z.. Towards the simplification of natural gas pipeline systems. Nova scientia [online]. 2012, vol.4, n.8, pp.26-41. ISSN 2007-0705.

Introduction: The problem of minimizing the fuel consumption incurred by compressor stations in steady-state natural gas transmission networks, which is one of the most relevant problems in the field, is addressed. In the real world, these type of instances are very large, in terms of the number of decision variables and the number of constraints, and very complex due to the presence of non-linearity and non-convexity in both the set of feasible solutions and the objective function. Method: The contribution of this work is to present a study of the properties of gas pipeline networks, and exploit them to develop a technique that can be used to reduce significantly problem dimension, without disrupting problem structure. Results: Typical network configurations of different sizes are presented. The application of the proposed method considerably simplifies each instance by achieving relative reductions from 81 to 97%. Conclusion: The immediate impact is that a relatively large problem can be simplified by this technique and then be solved with considerable smaller computational effort.

Palabras llave : Operations research; natural gas pipeline systems; network optimization; nonconvex programming; preprocessing.