DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION STRATEGY FOR OPTIMAL DESIGN OF GAS TRANSMISSION NETWORK

This paper presents the application of Differential Evolution (DE), an evolutionary computation technique for the optimal design of gas transmission network. As a gas transmission system includes source of gas, delivery sites with pipeline segments and compressors, the design of efficient and economical network involves lot of parameters. In addition, there are many equality and inequality constraints to be satisfied making the problem highly non-linear. Hence an efficient strategy is needed in searching for the global optimum. In this study, DE has been successfully applied for optimal design of gas transmission network. The results obtained are compared with those of nonlinear programming technique and branch and bound algorithm. DE is able to find an optimal solution with a cost that is less than reported in the earlier literature. The proposed strategy takes less computational time to converge when compared to the existing techniques without compromising with the accuracy of the parameter estimates.