An IoT-Supported Small-Scale Liquefied Natural Gas Distribution System Using Tank Trucks in Local Areas

In China, the demand for natural gas has been drastically increasing among small and medium-sized enterprises in the past few years. Due to the high cost of pipeline opening and inaccessibility of the pipeline network in remote regions, small-scale liquified natural gas (LNG) distribution in local areas has become a popular gas distribution pattern. However, existing solutions mainly focus on the distribution between LNG receiving stations and end users with large gas storage volumes, ignoring the increasingly large number of end users with small gas storage volumes. Furthermore, traditional communication approaches, such as telephone and SMS, between the end users and the gas distributors are still prevailing, which results in not only huge workload but also inefficiency and even gas depletion. This paper presents a small-scale liquified natural gas distribution system using tank trucks in local areas supported by Internet of things (IoT) technologies. An intelligent Industrial Internet terminal is designed to sense data of central gas stations and tank trucks, and the collected data is then transmitted to the IoT cloud platform for storage and analysis. A mathematical model of the LNG distribution problem is established, and genetic algorithm is applied to optimize the LNG distribution schedule based on the gas consumption status traced by the IoT platform. A case study of a small-scale LNG distribution system is presented to show the correctness of the proposed method.