The doctoral dissertations of the former Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and Aalto University Schools of Technology (CHEM, ELEC, ENG, SCI) published in electronic format are available in the electronic publications archive of Aalto University - Aaltodoc.
Aalto

Real-Time Receding Horizon Optimisation of Gas Pipeline Networks

Hans Aalto

Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be presented with due permission of the Department of Automation and Systems Technology for public examination and debate in Auditorium AS1 at Helsinki University of Technology (Espoo, Finland) on the 20th of May, 2005, at 12 noon.

Dissertation in PDF format (ISBN 951-22-7659-3)   [1773 KB]
Dissertation is also available in print (ISBN 951-22-7658-5)

Abstract

Real-time optimisation of gas pipelines in transient conditions is considered to be a challenging problem. Many pipeline systems are, however, only mildly non-linear. It is shown, that even the shutdown event of a compressor station can be described using a linear model. A dynamic, receding horizon optimisation problem is defined, where the free response prediction of the pipeline is obtained from a pipeline simulator and the optimal values of the decision variables are obtained solving a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem set up by using linear models, linearised constraints and quadratic approximations of the cost function, which is the energy consumption of the compressor stations (CSs). The problem is extended with discrete decision variables, the shutdown/start-up commands of CSs. A Mixed Logical Dynamical (MLD) system is defined, but the resulting Mixed Integer QP problem is shown to be very high-dimensional. Instead, a series of QP problems, each containing linear constraints modelling the shut down state of CSs, results in an optimisation problem with considerably smaller dimension.

The receding horizon optimisation is tested in a simulation environment and comparison with data from the Finnish natural gas pipeline shows that 5 to 8 % savings in compressor energy consumption can be achieved using optimisation. A new idea, maximisation of energy consumption, is used to calculate maximal energy savings potential of the pipeline. A new result is that step response models used in conjunction with MLD systems do not produce the same model change behaviour than state space models.

Keywords: real-time optimisation, receding horizon optimisation, gas pipeline optimisation, gas pipeline optimal control, mixed logical dynamical systems

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© 2005 Helsinki University of Technology


Last update 2011-05-26