Complexity of transmission network expansion planning NP-hardness of connected networks and MINLP evaluation

Transmission network expansion planning in its original formulation is NP-hard due to the subproblem Steiner trees, the minimum cost connection of an initially unconnected network with mandatory and optional nodes. By using electrical network theory we show why NP-hardness still holds when this subproblem of network design from scratch is omitted by considering already (highly) connected networks only. This refers to the case of extending a long working transmission grid for increased future demand. It will be achieved by showing that this case is computationally equivalent to 3-SAT. Additionally, the original mathematical formulation is evaluated by using an appropriate state-of-the-art mixed integer non-linear programming solver in order to see how much effort in computation and implementation is really necessary to solve this problem in practice. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.