A Practical Feeder Planning Model for Urban Distribution System

There is a significant gap between academic research and practical application for power distribution system planning (PDSP). For most of the existing PDSP models in academic research, cost is used as the objective function, and the most common constraints are power flow equality constraints, bus voltage or voltage drop limits, substation and feeder capacity limits, etc. Although various advanced models and methods have been proposed, they are rarely used in real distribution system companies. This paper proposes a new feeder planning model for the urban distribution network considering various practical requirements. According to field investigation, “supply electricity to loads using nearby power sources” is used as the objective, and it is analytically expressed by load moment. Block loads, practical street layout, meshed network configuration, connection mode of feeders, non-crossing requirement of feeders, power supply radius, etc., are all respected and embedded in the model. The proposed model is recast as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem, and it can be solved by the state-of-art commercial solver. The effectiveness and validity of the proposed model are illustrated on a 9-block test system and a real 22-block district distribution system.