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Minimising energy consumption in today's industrial sector is a crucial objective for achieving established climate goals. One effective strategy to enhance efficiency is optimising energy system operations within industries. The initial step in establishing operational optimisation involves developing a comprehensive model of the energy system. This model necessitates a specific structure to meet optimisation requirements. However, creating a model from scratch incurs substantial effort. While numerous companies possess energy models, they often lack the requisite structure for optimisation. Consequently, simplifying existing models can significantly reduce the effort needed to implement operational optimisation. This paper investigates the simplification of intricate industrial energy system models for optimisation purposes. The subsequent sections analyse two distinct approaches. One approach involves linearisation, while the other utilises neural networks. To facilitate a comparative analysis of these approaches, a reference model is developed. The assessment of these methodologies includes an investigation into optimisation robustness, computation time, accuracy concerning the reference model, and the effort required for developing and maintaining the simplified models. It proved that both approaches are suitable for operational optimisation. Linearisation exhibits superior computational efficiency compared to the neural network approach. The linearisation modelling approach together with the optimisation only required a few milliseconds for the calculation. The neural network approach needed 3 h for the calculation of the optimum with the genetic algorithm. The simulation of the neural network itself only required a few milliseconds. Hence, an improvement of the genetic algorithm is needed. However, the accuracy of linearisation falls short of that achieved by neural networks. The linearisation achieves a mean average percentage error from only 13%. In comparison the neural network's mean average error is 2.3%. Therefore, the linearisation must be improved. The impact using a piecewise linearisation on the results will be analysed in further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]