A Risk-Based Approach for Transmission Network Expansion Planning Under Deliberate Outages

This paper presents a risk-based approach for the transmission network expansion problem under deliberate outages. Malicious attacks expose network planners to a new challenge: how to expand and reinforce the transmission network so that the vulnerability against intentional attacks is mitigated while meeting budgetary limits. Within this framework network planners face the nonrandom uncertainty of deliberate outages. Unlike in previous approaches, the risk associated with this uncertainty is explicitly addressed in the proposed model. Risk characterization is implemented through the minimax weighted regret paradigm. The resulting mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulation is transformed into an equivalent mixed-integer linear programming problem for which efficient commercial solvers are available. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology. The risk-based expansion plans are compared with those achieved by a previously reported risk-neutral model. An out-of-sample assessment is carried out to show the advantages of the risk-based model over the risk-neutral approach. In addition, the tradeoff between risk mitigation and cost minimization is analyzed.