Method for Determining Optimal Configurations of Gas Metering Nodes and Gas Flow Measurement Points under Conditions of Uncertainty

The authors propose a new method for determining the configuration of natural gas metering nodes and gas flow measurement points, which takes into account, in addition to traditional approaches to the solution of this problem based on data on the technical and metrological characteristics of measuring instruments, also the criterion of the total cost of measuring devices under conditions of uncertainty. The measuring devices considered in the article are variable pressure differential flow meters, turbine gas meters, and ultrasonic flow meters, which are most often used in the construction, repair, or reconstruction of gas metering units and gas flow measurement points. The problem of selecting the optimal configuration of a natural gas metering unit is formulated, provided that the parameters in the optimization problem, which are caused by measurement errors, are treated as fuzzy numbers of the (L-R)-type. It is shown that the initial problem is transformed into an integer programming problem in which the constraint coefficients determining the unaccounted losses depend on the parameters of the triangular membership function, which is approximated by a Gaussian function. The problem of determining the optimal number of measuring devices for natural gas metering units or gas flow measurement points, which is formulated in this work, is solved using software in the MatLab environment. The effectiveness of the developed optimization problem software was tested on a specific example of choosing the optimal configuration of the metering node based on the criterion of minimal financial costs for equipping the metering node with natural gas metering devices for one of the gas distribution stations. A comparative analysis of two variants of the optimization problem was carried out: in a deterministic formulation and taking into account the fuzziness of the coefficients, which are caused by the measurement errors, within the limitation caused by unaccounted losses To verify the operation of the proposed method and the developed software, the initial data was used, which takes into account the real operating conditions of gas metering units and gas flow measurement points. The use of the proposed method will reduce the costs of construction, repair or reconstruction of gas metering units and gas flow measurement points.