Ant Colony Systems Application for Electric Distribution Network Planning

This paper presents an application of Ant Colony System Algorithm (ACS) to solve electrical distribution planning problems. This model constitutes an improved version of the ant system algorithm, permitting to generate food routes from their nest, and where a set of artificial ants are cooperating in order to find a good route through the data exchange contained by the pheromone deposits in several trajectories. This algorithm is applied to choose the best network plan that satisfies all demand requirements. Objective function includes fixed and variable costs associated to future investments and power losses subject to network constraints, The algorithm has been applied into a real 139-node network located in Cuenca, Ecuador.