A MULTISTAGE EXPANSION PLANNING METHOD FOR OPTIMAL SUBSTATION PLACEMENT

Optimal distribution substation placement is one of the major components of optimal distribution system planning projects. In this paper optimal substation placement problem is solved using Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) as a new developed heuristic optimization algorithm. This procedure gives the optimal size, site and installation time of medium voltage substation, using their related costs subject to operating and optimization constraints. A multistage and pseudo-dynamic expansion planning is applied to consider dynamic of the system parameters for example, load forecasting uncertainty, asset management and geographical constraints. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method a sensitivity analysis of ICA parameters on obtained results is done. A graphical representation of obtained results is used to show the efficiency and capability of the proposed method both from the planning view and graphical aspects. The results show the efficiency and capability of the proposed method which has been tested on a real size distribution network.