Optimal planning of power distribution communication network using genetic algorithm

This paper proposes a planning mechanism to design and plan the communication network for the smart distribution grid when considering economics, reliability and (n-1)-resilience. From the communications perspective, the smart distribution grid mainly consists of End Nodes (ENs) and Access Points (APs), in particular, a distribution grid planning problem focus on deciding which end nodes are to be enabled as access points. In order to solve the problem, an optimization problem is formulated first, which minimizes the cost of installing APs, meanwhile, the constraints of reliability and (n-1)-resilience should be satisfied simultaneously. Then, an approach based on improved genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to solve the proposed problem. Finally, simulation results in MATLAB testify that the proposed planning mechanism is capable to deal with diverse network size and planning effectively with high flexibility and scalability.