Open Access

Ralf Lenz, Kai-Helge Becker

• In commodity transport networks such as natural gas, hydrogen and water networks, flows arise from nonlinear potential differences between the nodes, which can be represented by so-called "potential-driven" network models. When operators of these networks face increasing demand or the need to handle more diverse transport situations, they regularly seek to expand the capacity of their network by building new pipelines parallel to existing ones ("looping"). The paper introduces a new mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model and a new non-linear programming (NLP) model and compares these with existing models for the looping problem and related problems in the literature, both theoretically and experimentally. On this basis, we give recommendations about the circumstances under which a certain model should be used. In particular, it turns out that one of our novel models outperforms the existing models. Moreover, the paper is the first to include the practically relevant option that a particular pipeline may be looped several times.