In modern refineries, hydrogen is widely used for the production of clean fuels. In this paper, a new method is presented in order to use hydrogen more effectively in refineries. This new method is based on combination of linear programming with imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) in order to optimize the hydrogen distribution network. In this new approach, optimization is performed in two levels. In one level the hydrogen network layout is proposed by ICA and in the other level the total annual cost and utility are optimized by the linear programming. Thus, the minimum cost and the optimal configuration of the hydrogen distribution network are obtained. Finally, to illustrate the application of this method two cases are studied.
