Computing surrogates for gas network simulation using model order reduction

CPU-intensive engineering problems such as networks of gas pipelines can be modelled as dynamical or quasi-static systems. These dynamical systems represent a map, depending on a set of control parameters, from an input signal to an output signal. In order to reduce the computational cost, surrogates based on linear combinations of translates of radial functions are a popular choice for a wide range of applications. Model order reduction, on the other hand, is an approach that takes the principal structure of the equations into account to construct low-dimensional approximations to the problem. We give an introductory survey of both methods, discuss their application to gas transport problems and compare both methods by means of a simple test case from industrial practice.