COMPARISON OF LINEAR, NONLINEAR, AND NETWORK FLOW PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES IN FUEL SCHEDULING

The objective of fuel scheduling is to minimize the operating cost ove r a given time period while satisfying several constraints including f uel supply, fuel inventory, total power requirement, and generating un it power limits. This paper presents a comparison of network flow prog ramming (NFP) the out-of-kilter method, the linear programming (LP) re vised simplex method, and the nonlinear programming (NLP) generalized reduced gradient method in order to solve the fuel scheduling problem. For application in NFP and LP, a separable programming technique is u sed to linearize the objective function and the constraints. Results b ased on sample data obtained from Omaha Public Power District are pres ented to demonstrate the differences between NFP, LP, and NLP applicat ion to this problem.