Distribution Network Expansion Planning Approach for Large Scale Electric Vehicles Accommodation

The increased power demand incurred by electric vehicles (EVs) has imposed new challenges on the distribution network. One significant responsibility of the distribution network operator (DNO) is to design and expand the distribution network periodically to accommodate the ever-increasing demand. The previous researches mainly use relaxation techniques to enhance the problem tractability, which would involve additional binary variables and incur computation burden to the optimization problem, or even worse, may lead to an intractable problem. This paper develops a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model considering various network constraints for the distribution network expansion planning under a high penetration level of EVs. The stochastic characteristics of demands are addressed through set of scenarios. A distributed biased min-consensus algorithm based approach is proposed to solve the MINLP model. Finally, comparison tests are conducted on three different scales of distribution networks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the computation time of the proposed approach is reduced by 42.46% on average for different systems compared with that of the traditional shortest path algorithm based approach.