Power Line Routing Using Multi-Objective Optimization Methods

For construction of a power line, technical, economical and environmental factors should be considered. Different costs of a power line, such as the operation, maintenance, and equipment installation costs are affected by its position in the real world. The route can have serious impacts on the environment. Therefore, selection of an optimal route for a new electric power line is a multi-objective problem with conflicting objectives, i.e. a route with minimum cost may have very high and unacceptable environmental impacts. A GIS-based methodology for route selection of new power lines has been tested in this paper. In this approach, a multi-objective genetic algorithm is used for route optimization. Environmental impacts are taken into consideration together with the tower construction and cable lying costs. NSGA-II approach, with two objective functions and several constraints, has been used to handle the trade-offs between the costs and environmental impacts of different power line routes. Efficiency of the proposed approach has been demonstrated for power line (400 KV) routing in Marvdasht located in south of Iran. Usefulness of the approach has been tested for location of three routes with 3 tension towers. By providing detailed information about the conflicts and trade-offs between different objectives, decision-makers would be able to choose one of the given solutions, whereas in most of the previous studies, only one route has been presented as the final solution, resulting in compensation of one objective by the others. By using the proposed method for optimization, there is no need to combine different objective functions.