Efficient Planning of Substation AutomationSystem CablesThanikesavan Sivanthi and Jan PolandABB Switzerland Ltd, Corporate Research,Segelhofstrasse 1K, 5405, Baden-D¨attwil, Aargau, SwitzerlandAbstract The manual selection and assignment of appropriate cables to the interconnections between the devices of a substation automation system is a major cost factor in substation automation system design. This paper discusses about the modeling of the substation automation system cable planning as an integer linear optimization problem to generate an efficient cable plan for substation automation systems.1 IntroductionCabling between different devices of a substation automation system (SAS) is a major cost factor in the SAS design process. Usually computer aided design software is used to create the design templates of SAS devices and their interconnections. The design templates are then instantiated in a SAS project and the cables are manually assigned to the connections. The selection and assignment of cables to connections must follow certain engineering rules. This engineering process is usually time consuming and can cause engineering errors, thereby increasing the engineering cost. Apparently, the SAS cable planning is related to the well known bin packing problem. The SAS cable planning can be formulated as an integer linear optimization problem with the cable engineering rules expressed as a set of linear constraints and a cost objective for minimizing the total cable cost. This paper describes the formulation of SAS cable planning problem as an integer linear optimization problem and presents the results for some representative test cases. To the best of the authors’ knowledge the work is the first of the kind t...
