Optimal planning of high voltage distribution substations

Abstract

Aimed at solving the problem of optimal planning for high voltage distribution substations, an efficient method is put forward. The method divides the problem into two sub-problems: source locating and combina tional optimization. The algorithm of allocating and locating alternatively (ALA) is widely used to deal with the source lo cating problem, but it is dependent on the initial location to a large degree. Thus, some modifications were made to the ALA algorithm, which could greatly improve the quality of solutions. In addition, considering the non-convex and non-concave nature of the sub-problem of combinational optimization, the branch-and-bound technique was adopted to obtain or approximate a global optimal solution. To improve the efficiency of the branch-and-bound technique, some heuristic principles were proposed to cut those branches that may generate a global optimization solution with low probability. Examples show that the proposed algorithm meets the requirement of engineering and it is an effective approach to rapidly solve the problem of optimal planning for high voltage distribution substations.