An optimized power terminal communication access network planning based on hierarchical genetic algorithm

Power terminal communication access network (PTCAN) is an important network for smart grid applications due to its ability of monitoring and remotely controlling smart power distribution devices and carrying the consumer information. In this paper, a hierarchical genetic algorithm is proposed to plan and optimize the Industrial Ethernet based PTCAN. The key idea of the algorithm is to transform the tree-form topology of power distribution network to a ring-form topology of PTCAN. A depth-first pre-order traversal based chromosome initialization method is raised in this paper and a hierarchical planning scheme is proposed to simplified the algorithm complexity. Corresponding evaluation and selection function, crossover and mutation method are designed and described in detail. At last, a simulation is performed, the result shows our algorithm is fully feasible and has advantages of faster convergence rate and better performance.