Two new mathematical models for two level electricity network design with distributed generation

Authors: BURÇİN ÇAKIR ERDENER, BERNA DENGİZ, ZÜLAL GÜNGÖR, İMDAT KARA

Abstract: In the new millennium, traditional electrical power systems have undergone a significant change driven by a set of requirements arising from evolving and changing technology. Thus, fundamental changes have occurred in the way electrical energy is produced, transmitted, and distributed. This situation has revealed the need to expand existing networks or to establish new networks. The available literature revealed that particular attention to the latter one is still limited due to the complexity of the power system. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the body of literature that tries to address the gap at overall design of a power distribution network. Moreover, distributed generation integration is also considered simultaneously with network design. In this paper, a two-level electricity distribution system design with distributed generation (TLEDS_DG) for green-field planning is considered. The TLEDS_DG is defined to find the locations of distribution transformers, to decide the number of distributed generators, and to design underlying two-level network in such a way that demand and capacity constraints are satisfied, and the overall design cost is minimized. Two mathematical models, a node-based and flow-based, are proposed and compared in terms of solution quality and CPU times. Within the flow-based formulation which is a new technique, called node cloning, is used to transform a two-level network into a single-level one. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach (flow-based formulation with node cloning), we conduct numerical studies based on randomly generated instances up to 300 customers. Additionally, sensitivity analysis is also applied to demonstrate the impacts of initial parameter settings. Computational results on a large suite of test problems show that the proposed approach (flow-based formulation with node cloning) is efficient and highly effective for the generated test problems.

Keywords: Two-level networks, facility location

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