Abstract—In planning of radial power distribution system, optimal feeder routing play an important role. This paper proposes a simple approach to optimize the total annual cost of the network, which represents investment cost (fixed cost) for feeder line as well as substation and operational costs (energy loss costs). The main objective of this method is to find the optimal route for each load point in large size electric power distribution system and to obtain the optimal radial network. An algorithm is proposed for simplified case study of a feeder network. The proposed algorithm is validated using MATLAB and the result thus obtained is compared with the existing results. The numerical results with different test cases are discussed, thus verifying the effectiveness of this approach.

Index Terms—Feeder routing, load flow analysis, path search algorithm, radial distribution network

Cite: Vikrant Kumar, Ram Krishan, and Yog Raj Sood, "Optimization of Radial Distribution Networks Using Path Search Algorithm," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp.182-187, September 2013. doi: 10.12720/ijeee.1.3.182-187