Specialized differential evolution technique to solve the alternating current model based transmission expansion planning problem

•The electric transmission expansion planning problem was studied.•A Differential Evolution (DE) based approach using the AC model was proposed.•A better strategy to generate initial solutions.•A better handling of the function evaluation process.•A comparative study among DE variations and some other meta-heuristics.

Solving the Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) problem using the Alternating Current (AC) network model is a recent important trend. This problem is extremely difficult to solve due to its combinatorial nature and the non-linear behavior presented by using the AC network model, and only very few research works had tackled it so far. In this work, an improved and specialized application of Differential Evolution (DE) to solve the TEP problem in its static form, using the AC model and taking into account reactive power compensation is presented. The main goal of this work is to make feasible the use of the AC network model for TEP. This approach improves some features of traditional differential evolution in its binomial version to be applied to solve the TEP problem. Some comparisons are performed using some other swarm based meta-heuristics in order to demonstrate the good results obtained. Test and realistic networks are used to present the results of this new approach.