A Metaheuristic Approach for Transmission System Expansion Planning

Transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) is a very important problem to power system. The problem is very complex and computationally demanding because of discrete nature of decision variables and large number of options to be analyzed. Hence, more robust and efficient techniques are required to solve such problem. One of the recently developed metaheuristic, known as Harmony search (HS) has been tested for many engineering optimization problems and found to be an efficient tool for optimization. Hence, the motivation for this chapter is to investigate the application of HS for TNEP. The results for three sample test system are obtained to show the potential of the tested algorithm. The results obtained with HS are compared with basic binary GA to confirm the effectiveness of HS in terms of solution quality and number of fitness function evaluations required.