A less-effort method for spatial network planning

This paper presents a method to solve Spatial Network Planning (SNP) in power systems expansion. SNP is an integration of Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) and optimal line routing problems. In fact, SNP considers the impacts of lines routing on the network power flow. Therefore, it can exploit such impacts to attain a significant techno-economic solution. In this work, a preprocessing stage is employed to reduce the computational effort demanded by line routing. Furthermore, a meta-heuristic algorithm is engaged to solve such a complicated problem. Applying these modifications made it possible to solve SNP for large-scale systems with high-resolution rasterized maps. The proposed method is applied to a 3-bus system, an 18-bus test system as well as the original and modified versions of the IRAN southeast high-voltage transmission network to demonstrate the capability of the proposed methodology. (C) 2018 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved.