Estudo de expansão da rede de distribuição de gás natural por programação matemática: possível aplicação em uma região de Fortaleza

Abstract

The Natural Gas fuel has as main characteristic a low cost to generate energy, besides having little polluting properties. In the state of Ceará, the consumption of this fuel serves the industrial sectors (cogeneration of energy) and automotive, but it is incipient in sectors very important for the economy as the commercial one. The construction of infrastructures for the transportation of Natural Gas is quite expensive, making difficult its wide offer in Brazil. From this, it is necessary to search for alternatives that minimize their implementation costs, in order to allow an expansion of the fuel supply in question. The objective of the present work is to carry out a study of the expansion of the Natural Gas distribution network in a region of Fortaleza, through the identification of potential demand and a model that allows a future project with optimization of the costs of the facilities. As a methodology, the points of demand in the region were defined, referring to potential natural gas consumers, and mathematical programming models were used, which were solved through the LINGO program, in order to achieve an optimum logistic result. Given the computational complexity of the problems generated, a decomposition strategy was employed, thus enabling the attainment of viable results for the problem.