A faster genetic algorithm for substation location and network design of power distribution systems

In this paper, a genetic algorithm is employed to plan the medium and long term expansion of electric power distribution systems. The expansion planning task is modeled as a single-objective optimization problem in which the objective function is the monetary cost of the network. A new procedure is proposed to perform substation location jointly with network topology design. Such a procedure is performed during function evaluation, and it requires low computational cost. Results for a real eight bus energy system are presented. These results show that reasonable solutions can be reached in a computational time considerably lower than the one required by former methods.