Abstract
This paper presents a long-term network expansion planning method for practical distribution systems. A long-term network expansion planning is one of the important activities in distribution control centers. Several objective functions, including new equipment installation cost, utilization rate, reliability, and loss minimization should be evaluated considering yearly increase of network loads and newly installed loads for each year at planning stage. However, only a few cases have been evaluated by experienced persons practically because of the limited planning time and it is difficult to evaluate the optimality of generated plans. This paper proposes a long-term expansion planning method considering new equipment installation cost, utilization rate, reliability, loss minimization, and yearly increase of network loads. The feasibility of proposed method is demonstrated on a practical distribution system models with promising results.