Application of parallel tabu search to distribution network expansion planning with distributed generation

This paper proposes a parallel tabu search (PTS) based method for distribution network expansion planning in consideration of distributed generation (DG). It may be expressed as a combinatorial optimization problem that determines the location and capacity of feeders and substations while minimizing the network loss and installation cost. In this paper, DG is considered in the network expansion planning due to the importance in the deregulated distribution network. At the same time, the outage cost is introduced to improve the power quality in distribution systems. As a result, the formulation makes the network expansion planning problem much more complicated. To overcome the problem, this paper applies PTS of meta-heuristics to the distribution network expansion planning so that computational effort is reduced and the diversity of solution candidate is improved to evaluate a better solution. The proposed method is successfully applied to a sample system.