A Transmission Line Planning Method Based on Variable Size Grid and Improved Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm

Route planning for transmission lines has always been an important part of the power construction industry. In the past, however, such planning has involved many critical steps, not only collecting complex geographic information data, but also performing personnel calculations. The collected data needed to be analyzed by engineers, and then safety and reliability were taken into account to determine the lowest economic cost route option. This traditional approach is not only very consuming for personnel, but also lacks reliability. This is because the development of the scheme is too dependent on the experience and decision making of the personnel. Now this paper proposes an intelligent route selection algorithm that improves on the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. Unlike previous route planning algorithms that are based on fixed size grid (FSG) maps, this paper uses variable size grid (VSG) maps to replace the maps with fixed-size grids. This not only reduces the number of grids in the route search to speed up the search speed, but also better fits the terrain to improve the rationality of the route. Then the grid node structure of the variable size grid is optimized. Then the heuristic function of the ACO algorithm is improved, and the parallel search based on variable-size grids is adopted. This not only improves the efficiency, but also increases the chance of searching the global optimal route. Finally, route optimization is performed on the routes to achieve smoothing process and reduce the cost of the towers.