Static transmission network expansion planning of electric power systems using the firefly optimization

This paper proposes a method based on Firefly Optimization (FO) to solve the static transmission network expansion planning (STNEP) of electric power systems. For this purpose, this paper has used heuristics information so as to reduce the search space and therefore increasing the efficiency of the bio-inspired optimization process. The proposed methodology can be divided into two steps: (1) Firstly, the reduced set of routes is obtained through the heuristics information, in order to identify relevant path for expansion and to reduce the search space; (2) The other one, the Firefly Optimization (FO) uses the heuristic information provided by the first step in order to find the minimum expansion investment cost. The proposed methodology is applied to the Garver system and two real equivalent South and Southeastern Brazilian systems.