Leveraging warm starts and truck-based flexibility for efficient congestion management in Integrated Electricity-Hydrogen Systems

The growing integration of hydrogen energy systems with electrical power grids introduces considerable operational complexities, particularly in relation to the physical limitations of hydrogen transmission such as pipeline congestion. To address these challenges, this study develops an optimal scheduling framework for an Integrated Electricity-Hydrogen System (IEHS) that, for the first time, incorporates hydrogen truck transportation as a flexible and dispatchable resource for the proactive management of pipeline congestion. The inherently complex and nonconvex scheduling problem is reformulated as a tractable Mixed-Integer Second-Order Cone Programming (MISOCP) model. In addition, a relax-and-repair warm start algorithm is proposed to enhance the computational tractability of this large-scale optimization problem. Results indicate that the truck coordination strategy reduces the peak hydrogen flow in congested pipelines to 30%–50% of constrained levels and facilitates a more cost-effective re-dispatch across the entire system. Furthermore, the proposed relax-and-repair warm start algorithm reduces the total computation time by 18% to 35% in various scenarios, without compromising the optimality of the solution. These findings demonstrate that the proposed model and algorithm offer a robust and efficient approach to achieve efficient congestion management and stronger operational security of the IEHS.