Abstract
The optimization of interconnection cost among plants is a significant work in the process of area-wide layout design of industrial area, since pipeline network influences the costs of investment and operation, and even energy loss. Unfortunately, few papers focus on the further study about this aspect. Most current methods are used to calculate the cost of one-to-one connected piping of material flows. However, this method is not applicable to the pipeline network with branches and different diameters, for example, the steam piping. This paper presented a method, which put Kruskal algorithm and arrangement and combination for the calculation of length and linear programming (LP) model for the calculation of cost together, to calculate the total investment of steam piping. In addition, the unit prices of pipelines with different diameters according to the steam production and usage condition in different plants are considered when calculating steam piping cost. As another factor of area-wide layout, some simple geographical constraint is added in the model to make the optimized layout be more practical. The objective function is to minimize the costs of pipeline network. The mathematical model is solved by genetic algorithm (GA) toolbox in MATLAB. Finally, the case study shows the accuracy and rationality of the proposed method.
