Transmission network planning using evolutionary programming

The paper presents an evolutionary programming approach to transmission network planning in electric power systems. This is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, with a combinatorial nature that leads to an extremely large number of alternative solutions for medium and large size electric systems. The transmission planning problem is briefly described and subsequently formulated in mathematical terms. The proposed evolutionary programming algorithm is applied to a reference electric system for which the solution is known and its performance is compared with simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and tabu search. The application of the proposed algorithm to a large electric network that is representative of the Mexican electric system is reported.