A planning model for offshore natural gas transmission

Abstract

This paper aims at new approach to solve complex integrated offshore gas planning problems, defining the best transmission strategy for a system with a large number of platforms interconnected between them and with delivery points through a complex gas pipeline network (which can be cycled). The problem is formulated as a large quadratic mixed-integer problem, where non-convexity and non-differentiability is found. Because the complexity of the problem, it is proposed a heuristic, in the context of genetic technique, for solving it. Several numerical experiments are presented at the end of this work. The results show that the performance of our approach is very good, being its results very close to exact solutions. The algorithm could be used for sizing and optimization designs of gas pipeline networks, as well as for the gas transmission planning of an existing network, seeking for profit maximization.

natural gas; transmission networks; genetic meta-heuristic