An evolutionary approach to operational planning and expansion planning of large-scale distribution systems

This paper presents an approach to deal with the problem of operational planning and expansion planning of distribution systems. Operational planning is to choose a new system configuration, out of the existing system, to meet the load profile in a better way, more reliably and with fewer losses. The expansion planning considers additions to the existing system. To evaluate the goodness of a new addition, one should know how the system would operate with that new addition included-hence an operational planning problem should be solved. Thus an operational planning problem should be solved for each expansion plan to be considered. In this paper, the authors present the development of, and experience with, an evolutionary computation approach to address, and to actually solve, the operational planning and expansion-planning problems for real-size distribution systems. Results for a 385-node, 442-branch network are presented.