Rigorous synthesis of energy supply systems by time-series aggregation

Abstract A rigorous solution method is proposed for complex synthesis problems of energy supply systems with large time series. Time-series aggregation is used to iteratively tighten feasible solutions as upper bounds and best possible solutions as lower bounds. To initialize the method, the time series is aggregated to one time step. The lower bound is obtained by relaxing and underestimating the energy demands of all time steps which makes the corresponding equations redundant allowing for an efficient solution of the relaxed synthesis problem. The upper bound results from a restriction to an operation problem for the structure obtained from the lower bound solution. If the bounds do not satisfy the specified optimality gap, the resolution of the time series aggregation is increased and the solution process is restarted. The solution method is applied to an industrial real-world synthesis problem. The results show the fast convergence of the solution method outperforming a commercial state-of-the-art solver.