Distribution system planning through combined heuristic and quadratic programing approach

The present paper reports a new technique for the planning of a radial distribution system. Distribution system planning has been formulated as a problem of Quadratic Mixed Integer Programming (QMIP). A two-stage iterative solution technique has been proposed where the first stage determines the optimum substation sites and the second stage determines the optimum network configurations. To reduce the dimensionality problem, the integer constraints are first relaxed, thus converting the quadratic mixed integer programming problem into Quadratic Programming (QP) problem. After the solution of the QP problem, integer constraints are imposed using heuristic techniques.