Open Access

Ryohei Yokoyama, Yuji Shinano, Tetsuya Wakui

• For the purpose of attaining the highest performance of energy supply systems, it is important to design the systems optimally in consideration of their operational strategies for seasonal and hourly variations in energy demands. An ap- proach to efficiently solve such an optimal design problem with a large number of periods for variations in energy de- mands is to derive an approximate optimal design solution by aggregating periods with a clustering method. However, such an approach does not provide any information on the accuracy for the optimal value of the objective function. The purpose of this paper is to propose a time aggregation approach for deriving suitable aprroximate optimal design solutions and evaluting their values of the objective function accurately. This time aggregation approach is realized by combining a robust optimal design method under uncertain energy demands and a hierarchical approach for solving large scale optimal design problems. A case study is conducted for a cogeneration system with a practical configuration, and it turns out that the proposed approach enables one to evaluate effective upper and lower bounds for the optimal value of the objective function as compared with those obtained by a conventional approach.