Abstract:
German gas transport system operators (TSO) are obliged to offer as much freely allocable capacity as possible. Freely allocable capacities enable gas traders to feed in or withdraw gas at certain entries and exits without having to care where the gas is withdrawn or fed in, respectively. When offering transmission capacities, the TSO has to ensure that all gas flow situations that may result from the offered capacities can be technically realized. This requirement can hardly be verified with existing simulation-based planning tools. In response to this, Germany's largest TSO, Open Grid Europe GmbH, initiated the research project "ForNe - Research Cooperation Network Optimization" in 2009, where more than 30 mathematicians from 7 German research institutes successfully developed mathematical optimization models and algorithms to tackle this problem. Now, the results of this research are about to be transformed into an application software that fulfills all requirements of a productive network planning tool.