DISTRICT DESIGN AND ROUTE PLANNING FOR CUSTOMER-RELATED FIELD OPERATIONS OF NATURAL GAS DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY

Approximately 24% of the world energy requirement is supplied by natural gas. A natural gas distribution system in a city consists of four main processes, i.e. construction, operating, internal installations, and customer services, which are connected to each other. In this study, customer services processes of the distribution system which are directly related to customers is considered. Mathematical formulations are presented for customer services processes such as district design, route planning and mobile team workload assignment, and applied on one of the authorized natural gas distribution company in Turkey. Performance of the proposed formulations is compared with the current system by means of the number of mobile teams and amount of workloads. The computational studies show that the number of mobile teams of the proposed system is 37% lower than the current system.