Decision support procedures in energy distribution networks

Unlike many continental natural gas transmission systems which carry gas thousands of miles to discrete area´s of demand, the UK National Transmission System has many centres of demand distributed throughout the network and suffers from highly variable weather conditions. Thus, with over two thirds of the natural gas being required for domestic needs such as space and water heating, considerable control features have been installed to help meet supply-demand targets throughout the year. Many decision support tools exist within British Gas plc. These divide the efficient management problem into several parts, producer gas scheduling, transmission network optimisation, maintenance and special operations scheduling, which are treated separately before the results are brought together for expert assessment and decision. The author reports on how the gas industries operation and planning problems can be thought of as problems of resource management, and illustrate how some of the major operations of the UK NTS can be integrated into a single games theoretic framework, by depicting the NTS as a closed trading market in which individual entities trade in gas commodities