Optimal long-term transmission planning by expert system approach

This paper deals with an expert system approach to the optimal long-term transmission planning (OLTP) problem. In this study, an expert system (ES) which can emulate planner's heuristic knowledge is explored to resolve the various difficulties of OLTP. In realization of the ES, the state space method is adopted for the problem representation. Each state represents the network configuration in the specified time and a state transition represents configuration. The heuristic defined as a sum of the present values of construction cost and the annual operation cost of power system. The latter is defined as the minimized sum, in annual economic operation sense, of total generation fuel cost and failure cost formulated with Linear Programming (LP) method. To find the optimal solution in the state space, the Branch-and-Bound (B&B) technique with the newest-first and the best-first search method using the investment priority index is described. Finally, the developed ES for OLTP is applied to 5-bus/3-year sample planning problem for a case study.<>