Multi-year expansion planning for distribution systems

A multi-term distribution system expansion planning method is proposed. Many mathematical programming approaches have been proposed in this area. However, because of the complexity of the problem or the limitations of a computational time and memory size, these methods can only be applied to a small-scale system. To solve large-scale problems, the authors propose a new decomposition algorithm based on the branch exchange method. A n-years planning problem is decomposed into n one-year planning problems, and one-year results are coordinated through what can be called the forward/backward path. The validity and effectiveness of the algorithm are ascertained by applying it to real-scale numerical examples.>