Automated model reduction of complex gas pipeline networks

With the European gas market becoming liberalized and more and more interconnected, the transport system operators (TSOs) are committed by the authorities to publish available capacities to network users and other TSOs in a transparent and unified way. According to our analysis this could be achieved using bottleneck models of local networks, i.e. minimal hydraulic models which are just sufficient to decide on the physical feasibility of a given flow pattern within predefined accuracy and predefined ranges of the boundary conditions. The article will mainly focus on a systematic and automatic procedure to derive such bottleneck models from full hydraulic models via symbolic simplification. Symbolic simplification combines computer algebra and numerical analysis to identify and extract dominant network components. The reduced model is again a hydraulic model with well interpretable parameters. The methodology has been applied successfully to a real-world pipeline network.