Electricity distribution planning model: A network design approach for solving the master problem of the Benders decomposition method

The authors present here a Lagrangean relaxation method combined with a heuristic procedure to solve the master problem of an electricity distribution planning model. A Benders decomposition method is used to solve the equivalent global mixed integer linear programming problem. The procedure exploits the inherent network structure of the master problem and eliminates the difficulty of dealing with a dynamic problem. The procedure also gives some interesting computational results.