Minimum cost analysis of feeder routing in distribution system planning

A new approach for optimal network routing in distribution planning is presented in this paper. The distribution network routing planning problem is formulated as a non-linear constrained, non-differentiable optimization problem. The main objective is to minimize the total cost which is the summation of reliability costs, feeder resistive loss, investment and maintenance costs. Simulated annealing, which is a general purpose combinatorial optimization algorithm, is used to obtain a global optimum solution of the problem.