Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization of a High-Pressure Cross-Country Natural Gas Pipeline: Application of an Ant Colony Optimization Technique

The process of natural gas transportation through cross-country pipelines, with intermittent repressurization with the help of compressors that use part of the same gas for energy source, is a very interesting optimization problem that has attracted researchers. In the present work, an 18-node network connecting a single source to a single delivery point has been selected for analysis. A steady-state model, incorporating gas flow dynamics, compressor characteristics, and mass balance equations, has been developed. Ant colony optimization, a comparatively new evolutionary technique in pipeline optimization, has been used for minimizing fuel consumption for a fixed throughput. A comparison with a similar optimization tool, a solver of a general algebraic modeling system that extracts the principle of generalized reduced gradient algorithm, indicates an improved solution in terms of fuel consumption minimization. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.