Pipeline network design applications

There is little doubt that computer-aided design techniques can give rise to drastic reductions of time and cost in designing pipeline networks. For small to medium applications Bonansinga (B8) estimated that a job which would have cost 500 by manual solution could now be accomplished at a cost of 7 using a computer. The comparison is even more favorable to the latter approach when multiple case studies are required. For large applications Neufville et al. (N3) estimated that the time required is about 1/100 of that required by manual calculations. 

Publications on optimal design of tree networks are further divided into single-branch trees or pipelines (C6, F4, L3, L6, S8) and many-branch trees (B7, C7, F4, Kl, K2, M3, M9, Nl, R5, W10, Y1, Zl). For our purposes, since the pipeline problems can always be solved using the optimization methods developed for the many-branch tree networks, we need to dwell no further on this special case. On the other hand, it is important to note that the form of the objective function could influence the applicability of a given optimization method. For the sake of concreteness, problem formulations and optimization techniques will be discussed in the context of applications. 

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