Strategies for Power Systems Expansion Planning in a Competitive Electrical Market

A new methodology is presented for decision making in long-term expansion planning. Power system expansion planning involves an intrinsic uncertainty on data and parameters, a fact often worsened by the new rules of deregulated electrical markets. The proposed procedure models both the uncertainty in load forecasting and the experience of the planning expert who uses fuzzy sets theory and fuzzy dynamic programming in the model algorithm to find an optimal expansion alternative.This procedure was tested in a realistic model system and the results obtained were arranged in an expansion planning ranking list according to their membership in the decision set.