Resilient Natural Gas Transmission Network Design Optimization: A Case Study

Nowadays, designing the resilient natural gas transmission network is an important and essential issue for industry experts and policymakers due to great economic, health, security and social losses created by relevant disruptions. This paper develops a two-stage approach for the design of resilient natural gas (NG) transmission network. In the first stage, the risk of each pipeline route is calculated based on distances of diffusion concentration. In the second stage, a multi-objective mixed possibilistic-stochastic programming model is presented to enhance the resiliency of the natural gas network by utilizing proactive strategies such as parallel pipeline, fortification and back-up turbo compressor under demand uncertainty and disruption risks. In addition, the proposed model considers different failure modes of the pipeline. Finally, the model validation is done by the data of a real case study. Our analysis shows that the performance of the natural gas transmission network is highly vulnerable to demand fluctuations. Also, results indicate that employing both pipeline fortification and back-up pipeline strategies have numerous impacts on the resiliency of the NG network. Important managerial insights are obtained from the model implementation in a case study.