A comprehensive method for optimal expansion planning using particle swarm optimization

This paper proposes a holistic approach to planning transmission networks. This is necessitated by the need for entrepreneurs to evaluate the costs and returns of a merchant transmission project, before committing actual investment. Most papers addressing this problem are probably limited in scope to subsets of the total gamut of relevant issues. Although some of the cost items, mentioned here, deal with average cost, the parametric approach, which is adopted here, enables easy introduction of stochastic variation on these mean values. Thus the proposed approach is amenable to a more thorough risk analysis. The entire problem is formulated as an optimization problem and solved using particle swarm optimization. The results of a few case studies are presented.