Design and operations of gas transmission networks

Problems dealing with the design and the operations of gas transmission networks arechallenging. The difficulty mainly arises from the simultaneous modeling of gastransmission laws and of the investment costs. The combination of the two yields a nonlinearnon-convex optimization problem. To obviate this shortcoming, we propose a newformulation as a multi-objective problem, with two objectives. The first one is theinvestment cost function or a suitable approximation of it; the second is the cost of energythat is required to transmit the gas. This energy cost is approximated by the total energydissipated into the network. This bi-criterion problem turns out to be convex and easilysolvable by convex optimization solvers. Our continuous optimization formulation can beused as an efficient continuous relaxation for problems with non-divisible restrictions suchas a limited number of available commercial pipe dimensions.....