Research On Optimization And System Design For Coal Blending And Purchase Planning In Thermal Power Plants

Energy is the essential material base of our national economy. Meanwhile, it is the guarantee for sustainable development of our nation. The major source of energy is coal in China where coal resource presents an uneven distribution and great difference in quality, which makes the thermal power plants can merely use designed coal. Therefore, companies need to achieve complementary advantage of coal resources through coal blending. Meanwhile, coal procurement costs and inventory management costs account for a large proportion of cost structure of thermal power plant. How to reduce costs by arranging coal procurement scientificially and reasonably attracts more and more attention.Using actual need of a domestic power plant as research background, combined with actual production condition, this paper concentrates on two problems, coal blending and purchasing plan during thermal power process.The main works of this dissertation are summarized as follows:1) The objective and significance of coal blending and coal purchase plan are discussed. Domestic and overseas research status of coal blending and coal procurement are introduced. Meantime we analyse the potential problems of coal blending and coal procurement.2) Based on the actual investigation of a domestic power plant, we establish system requirements analysis, program the main function of the system and propose performance requirements of the system.3) The main parameters of coal quality are introduced, the linear additivity of which in coal blending process is discussed. Meanwhile, the theories of logistics balance and safety stock of purchasing are expounded. According to this two optimization problems of coal blending and purchasing plan, we create a coal blending mathematical model aimed to minimize the total cost of coal blending and a procurement plan mathematical model aimed to minimize the total cost of the procurement chain respectively. By using a linear programming software package called 1p_solve to solve the both models, they are proved to be feasible and effective.4) Based on the background of requirements analysis and the optimization models, we develop and achieve an assistant decision system which is developed with integrated development environment, Flash Builder and MyEclipse. The system uses Flex+Spring+ Hibernate framework to build a service development platform, uses Oracle as the database, and Tomcat as the Web server. The system can provide users four core functions:basic data management, automated coal blending, human-computer cooperative coal blending and data management of coal procurement. The system has beautiful interface, convenient operation, and good user experience. Finally, the model and system have been tested through the practical problems of a power plant. The result shows that the system can provide users with the optimal solution and bring considerable benefits to users’ actual production.