Stochastic pooling problem for natural gas production network design and operation under uncertainty

Product quality and uncertainty are two important issues in the design and operation of natural gas production networks. This paper presents a stochastic pooling problem optimization formulation to address these two issues, where the qualities of the flows in the system are described with a pooling model and the uncertainty in the system is handled with a multi‐scenario, two‐stage stochastic recourse approach. In addition, multi‐objective problems are handled via a hierarchical optimization approach. The advantages of the proposed formulation are demonstrated with case studies involving an example system based on Haverly's pooling problem and a real industrial system. The stochastic pooling problem is a potentially large‐scale nonconvex Mixed‐Integer Nonlinear Program (MINLP), and a rigorous decomposition method developed recently is used to solve this problem. A computational study demonstrates the advantage of the decomposition method over a state‐of‐the‐art branch‐and‐reduce global optimizer, BARON. © 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2011