Efficiency enhancements for evolutionary capacity planning in distribution grids

In this paper, we tackle the distribution network expansion planning (DNEP) problem by employing two evolutionary algorithms (EAs): the classical Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a linkage-learning EA, specifically a Gene-pool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm (GOMEA). We furthermore develop two efficiency-enhancement techniques for these two EAs for solving the DNEP problem: a restricted initialization mechanism to reduce the size of the explorable search space and a means to filter linkages (for GOMEA) to disregard linkage groups during genetic variation that are likely not useful. Experimental results on a benchmark network show that if we may assume that the optimal network will be very similar to the starting network, restricted initialization is generally useful for solving DNEP and moreover it becomes more beneficial to use the simple GA. However, in the more general setting where we cannot make the closeness assumption and the explorable search space becomes much larger, GOMEA outperforms the classical GA.