OPTIMAL FEEDER DESIGN IN DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM PLANNING

摘要

The distribution feeders, which are restricted to `available' areas, having Right of Way (ROW), can be interconnected in several ways, each leading to a different feeder design. Identification of Optimal Feeder Design (OFD), which minimizes length and loss of the feeder layout, is an important NP complete combinatorial optimization problem. Conventional designs like Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) minimizes capital investment, but neglects running cost of feeder losses. Feeder reconfiguration is then used to minimize loss of MST, wherein loss reduction strongly depends upon the existing network. OFD layout, developed using this method does not require any existing network. This method further calculates a Lower Bound (LB) on feeder cost, thereby avoiding exhaustive search for the global minimum. This method also defines a set of cofeeders, each in series with a Normally Open (NO) switch, to transform OFD into Single Fault Tolerant (SFT) OFD layout. The method also completely defines solution space of all feasible networks, including their representation. The method places heavily loaded feeders close to source, thereby ensuring substantial loss reduction at minimal cost of additional feeders. An exemplary embodiment of the invention, when applied to a conventional layout, results in loss reduction by 67%.