A flexible decision method for transmission system expansion planning considering power interruption cost

Under the current deregulation of the electric utility industry, power system planning has become more complex. System planners are required to study how to use available resources to meet customer's demand economically with acceptable reliability and quality. Integrated resource planning has emerged recently as one effective approach for this problem, and the approach has been expanded to include the value of reliability, that is, power interruption cost. This paper is aimed at developing a flexible decision method to select a favorable plan among various transmission system expansion alternatives, not only from a power supplier's viewpoint, but also from the customer's perspective, including cost of interruption. Bellman-Zadeh's maximizing decision using a fuzzy decision set is applied as a flexible decision method which is able to reflect the planner's intentions. Numerical examples are given to ascertain the effectiveness of the proposed method.