SIMONE Research Group
Solutions For Simulation And Optimisation In The Gas Industry

SIMONE SOFTWARE

Net Schedule Management

As the gas industry landscape gets ever more complicated with thousands of new players entering the gas business, the challenges for efficient management of day-to-day operations are mounting. Situation on the gas market with ever changing nominations for transport pose significant challenges for TSO’s to change their network mode (compressor stations, regulators, valves) to match the today and tomorrow’s demand. There is a need to dynamically manage network switching and network elements to match the situation when nominations can dramatically change every hour. Gas companies were looking for a tool that can optimise the current situation and nearest future with as low as possible transport cost while fulfilling the contract constraints. We have devised a way how to optimise this using SIMONE Net Schedule Management (NSM) module.

This system was designed to allow preparation of short term transport plans based on dynamic modeling of gas network using all available information about the current network state as well as nominated transport and domestic consumption. The basic principle is a possibility to quickly create dynamic scenarios for the rest of the current day and for the tomorrow’s gas day. The results of modeling can be compared, and the most suitable variant can be selected.

SIMONE - Net Schedule Management
  • NSM allows preparation of a transport plan for the next day or for the rest of the current gas day
  • It uses both, the state of the SIMONE Online model and the nomination data as the input data, as well as forecast data for the current and the next day
  • The preparation of the plan is done with the interactive graphical environment of NSM Task Manager
  • The most satisfying dynamic scenario with possibly corrected input data is the output
  • If this scenario doesn’t meet the expectations, a new variant might be created and the process can be re-started
  • Variants can be compared - it is possible to use a variant library to create a specific variant
  • The data of the resulting variant can be exported and reused in SIMONE Online or other related systems

NSM is a modular system and can be significantly modified for a particular customer. The case study showed daily decrease of 4-23% in fuel gas cost attributable to using SIMONE NSM.

SIMONE - NSM Case study