REAL-TIME OPTIMISATION OF NATURAL GAS PIPELINE SYSTEMS-A SIMPLIFIED APPROACH

Natural gas pipeline systems are very complicated. From a dynamic modelling, control and optimisation perspective, the number of model states is typically many thousands, the number of disturbance variables can be several hundred and the length of the prediction horizon for predictive control and optimsation must be long enough to include the very slow dynamics and the predicted important future events – typically gas consumption changes- in the system. Simplifications and approximations made to the original large-scale real-time optimisation problem results in a simplified receding horizon quadratic programming problem.