Optimization of electrical distribution feeders using simulated annealing

The planning of electrical power distribution systems strongly influences the supply of electrical power to consumers. The problem is to minimize both the investment cost for feeder and substations, and the power-loss cost. When the substations can already provide enough power flow, then the problem reduces to minimize the total cost related to the feeders and their power-loss. The difficulty of dealing with this problem increases rapidly with its size (i.e., the number of customers). It seems appropriate to use heuristic methods to obtain suboptimal solutions, since exact methods are too much time consuming. In this paper, a simulated annealing algorithm is used. A set of numerical results are provided.