Coordinated dispatch of integrated electricity-natural gas system and the freight railway network

With the significant development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) rail transport, the railway system is increasingly more closely connected with the integrated electricity-natural gas system (IEGS). To coordinate the economic operations of the two systems, this paper innovatively proposes a coordinated dispatch model of IEGS with LNG infrastructures and a freight railway network with LNG transport. First, an operational scheduling model of the railway network, considering energy consumption, is put forward for both LNG transmission and ordinary freight transport. Then, the coordinated dispatch problem of IEGS and the railway network is formulated into a mixed-integer linear programming model via the big M method and a modified incremental linearization approach. Finally, a bi-level optimization algorithm based on generalized benders decomposition (GBD) is presented to solve the coordinated dispatch problem due to the restrictions on exchanging private information. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm as well as the potential benefit for wind power accommodation.