Optimal expansion of medium-voltage power networks is a common issue in electrical distribution planning. Minimizing the total cost of the objective function with technical constraints make it a combinatorial problem which should be solved by powerful optimization algorithms. In this paper, a new improved hybrid Tabu search/particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed to optimize the electric expansion planning. The proposed method is analyzed both mathematically and experimentally and it is applied to three different electric distribution networks as case studies. Numerical results and comparisons are presented and show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. As a result, the proposed algorithm is more powerful than the other algorithms, especially in larger dimension networks.
