Solutions with performance guarantees on tactical decisions for industrial gas network problems

In the gas distribution industry, creating a tactical strategy to meet customer demand while meeting the physical constraints in a gas pipeline network leads to complex and challenging optimization problems due to the non-linearity, non-convexity, and combinatorial nature of the corresponding mathematical formulation of the problem. In this article, we study the performance of different approaches presented in the literature to solve both natural gas and industrial gas problems to either find global optimal solutions or determine the optimality gap between a local optimal solution and a valid lower bound for the problem’s objective. In addition to those considered in the literature, we consider alternative reformulations of the operational-level gas pipeline optimization problem. The performance of these alternative reformulations varies in terms of the optimality gap provided for a feasible solution of the problem and their solution time. In industry-sized problem instances, significant improvements are possible compared to solving the standard formulation of the problem.