Nogueira, TeresaVale, Zita2013-04-182013-04-182012978-3-642-23405-7978-3-642-23406-41867-8998http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/1398Natural gas industry has been confronted with big challenges: great growth in demand, investments on new GSUs – gas supply units, and efficient technical system management. The right number of GSUs, their best location on networks and the optimal allocation to loads is a decision problem that can be formulated as a combinatorial programming problem, with the objective of minimizing system expenses. Our emphasis is on the formulation, interpretation and development of a solution algorithm that will analyze the trade-off between infrastructure investment expenditure and operating system costs. The location model was applied to a 12 node natural gas network, and its effectiveness was tested in five different operating scenarios.engConstrained capacitiesFixed costsGas supply unitsGSUNatural gasOptimal locationOptimizationTransportation costsbook part2013-04-1210.1007/978-3-642-23406-4_3