Power Supply Meshes based Line Routing for Urban MV Distribution Network Planning

: Considering that it is difficult to determine the load points or the locations of user access facilities in urban areas for the planning years, an optimization method for the routing planning of urban medium - voltage (MV) trunk lines is proposed based on power supply meshes. Firstly, based on the results of load forecasting and high voltage substation planning, power supply meshes are generated in the entire planning area according to the principle of selecting standby substations close to loads. Then, based on the thinking line of “trunk firstly, branch then”, a shortest path based two-step algorithm is proposed to find the shortest trunk lines for the load centres of power supply meshes and the shortest trunk tie-line be-tween the load centres of each mesh. A numerical example shows that the method is practical and feasible, which can provide a reference for the reasonable routing scheme of medium voltage trunk lines.