A new approach to power network synthesis

The impact of reliability on operation and cost of power systems has become a very important concept with the growth of energy needs. Systems' planners have become increasingly interested in the following two questions: 1. How reliable the new systems are? and 2. How to plan for reliable the existing systems in the future is? The reliability and cost of these systems are important and are largely determined by network topology. Network topology consists of nodes and the links between nodes. The selection of optimal network topology is an NP-hard combinatorial problem so that the classical enumeration-based methods grow exponentially with size. In this paper, a Rule Based Genetic Algorithm is presented to solve the problem of power network synthesis considering cost and reliability. The algorithm is computationally efficient and highly effective on a large search space of test problems. Illustrative examples are included.