A new power distribution system planning through reliability evaluation technique

This paper describes a new method of planning for power distribution system. An algorithm has been developed to obtain an optimal solution by considering a non linear objective function with linear and non linear constraints for a large scale radial distribution system. The objective function is to be optimized through cost function minimization. A three stage iterative solution has been presented here. The first stage, i.e. 'substation optimization' determines the number of substation sites and its exact location, the second stage, i.e. 'feeder optimization' determines the number of feeders with their actual route, and lastly, the system node reliability evaluation has been made through outage cost optimization. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.