Solving Highly Detailed Gas Transport MINLPs: Block Separability and Penalty Alternating Direction Methods

Detailed modeling of gas transport problems leads to nonlinear and nonconvex mixed-integer optimization or feasibility models (MINLPs) because both the incorporation of discrete controls of the network as well as accurate physical and technical modeling is required in order to achieve practical solutions. Hence, ignoring certain parts of the physics model is not valid for … Read more

Penalty Alternating Direction Methods for Mixed-Integer Optimization: A New View on Feasibility Pumps

Feasibility pumps are highly effective primal heuristics for mixed-integer linear and nonlinear optimization. However, despite their success in practice there are only few works considering their theoretical properties. We show that feasibility pumps can be seen as alternating direction methods applied to special reformulations of the original problem, inheriting the convergence theory of these methods. … Read more

Solving Power-Constrained Gas Transportation Problems using an MIP-based Alternating Direction Method

We present a solution algorithm for problems from steady-state gas transport optimization. Due to nonlinear and nonconvex physics and engineering models as well as discrete controllability of active network devices, these problems lead to hard nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear optimization models. The proposed method is based on mixed-integer linear techniques using piecewise linear relaxations of the … Read more

Validation of Nominations in Gas Network Optimization: Models, Methods, and Solutions

In this article we investigate methods to solve a fundamental task in gas transportation, namely the validation of nomination problem: Given a gas transmission network consisting of passive pipelines and active, controllable elements and given an amount of gas at every entry and exit point of the network, find operational settings for all active elements … Read more