Identification of relevant routes for static expansion planning of electric power transmission systems

This study presents a new strategy aimed at the search space reduction and initialization of the multimodal optimization process to solve the problem of static expansion planning of electric power transmission systems. To this end, the proposed methodology first uses a constructive heuristic algorithm based on a portfolio of indices, in which the expansion decisions are relaxed and represented through the hyperbolic tangent function. By considering different slopes of the hyperbolic tangent function, within a predetermined range, associated with the main sensitivity indices existing in the literature, it is possible to extract a reduced set of expansion alternatives and feasible solutions. Thus, based on the heuristic information obtained, a bio-inspired algorithm is used to obtain a final expansion plan for electric power transmission systems. The electric power transmission network is represented by a linearized load flow, direct current (DC) model. The final expansion plans obtained by the proposed methodology were satisfactory, showing that the use of the hyperbolic tangent function added to the adopted heuristics yielded an effective decision strategy.