Optimization of Hydrogen Distribution Network by Imperialist Competitive AlgorithmIn

In modern refineries, hydrogen is widely used for the production ofclean fuels. In this paper, a new method is presented in order to usehydrogen more effectively in refineries. This new method is based oncombination of linear programming with imperialist competitivealgorithm (ICA) in order to optimize the hydrogen distributionnetwork. In this new approach, optimization is performed in two levels.In one level the hydrogen network layout is proposed by ICA and in theother level the total annual cost and utility are optimized by the linearprogramming. Thus, the minimum cost and the optimal configurationof the hydrogen distribution network are obtained. Finally, to illustratethe application of this method two cases are studied.