A Hybrid Decomposition Method for Integrating Coal Supply and Demand Models

A number of large scale models have been proposed and implemented in recent years to study the anticipated expansion of coal production and utilization in the United States. This paper reports on the application of mathematical programming decomposition methods to the constructive integration and optimization of these models. In particular, it was found that an implemented hybrid decomposition approach, part resource directed and part price directed, exhibited fast convergence to an optimal solution.