Pole and tower planning of trasmission line is a non-liner and multi-dimensional optimization problem which maybe has an discontinous or underivable objective function,so it is difficult to be resolved by traditional methods such as exhaustive method, trial-and-error method or analytical method. To solve these problems,Nelder-Mead simplex method and exterior point penalty function are used in combination to resolve pole and tower planning problem. The results show that the algorithm, supplemented by the external point method which takes the constraint condition as exponential penalty function to construct the augmented objective function, can easily deal with the constraints of various constraints.This algorithm is efficient 、and robust. It is easy to be programed,while,the possible local optimum should be excluded by engineering experience, so this algorithm has strong applicability.