Decision support system for design of long distance heat transportation system

District Heating (DH) systems are commonly supplied using local heat sources. Nowadays, modern insulation materials allow for effective and economically viable heat transportation over long distances (over 20 km). The paper proposes a Decision Support System (DSS) for optimized selection of design and operating parameters of a long distance Heat Transportation System (HTS). The method allows for evaluation of feasibility and effectiveness of heat transportation from the considered heat sources to the given DH area. The optimized selection is formulated as the multicriteria decision-making problem. The constraints for this problem include a static HTS model, allowing considerations of the system life cycle, as well as time variability and spatial topology. Thereby, the variation of heat demand and ground temperature within the DH area, the insulation and pipe aging, as well as the terrain elevation profile are taken into account in the decision-making process. The HTS construction costs, the operating costs (pumping power), and the heat loss are considered as objective functions, while such parameters as: inner pipeline diameter, insulation thickness, temperature and pressure profiles, as well as pumping station locations are optimized during the decision-making process. Moreover, variants of pipe laying e.g. one pipeline with a larger diameter, or two parallel pipelines with smaller diameters might be considered during the optimization. The analyzed optimization problem is multicriteria, hybrid and nonlinear. The genetic solver has been proposed to solve it. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.