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The Agent-based Energy Network Infrastructure (AENI) model is an advanced computational tool developed to optimise the design, planning, and operation of pipeline networks for low-carbon infrastructures, including Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS), hydrogen, and district heat networks.
AENI integrates novel pipeline network design methodologies with dynamic industry and consumer decision-making to deliver an end-to-end solution for planning and analysing new pipeline-based energy systems. AENI interlinks the routing, sizing, and temporal planning of pipeline networks, ensuring that infrastructure development is optimised across multiple time periods and geographical terrains. An example hydrogen network (HN) expansion is highlight on the right. The model can design bespoke pipeline routes, minimise traversal across costly areas, generate realistic network topologies, and optimally size pipelines, aligning specifications with commercial availability and future scalability. AENI's agent-based approach introduces dynamic industry and consumer decision-making into the model, enabling it to reflect the impact of these decisions on the network's design and economic outlook. The model can iterate through many scenarios and offer a framework for analysing how design requirements shift under varying production and uptake scenarios, as well as perform the basis for understanding the risks of various design pathways. This holistic approach allows AENI to produce spatially-explicit designs that not only optimise individual low-carbon infrastructures but also examine how they can be interlinked and co-developed in a way that mitigates against the hard-to-predict decisions of actors. 
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