Optimal placement of multi-terminal HVDC interconnections for increased operational flexibility

In this paper we present three different algorithms for the placement of multi-terminal HVDC interconnections. The speciality is the quantitative incorporation of operational flexibility in the placement algorithms. The first algorithm tries to find the most economical placement, the second algorithm looks for the placement which yields the highest operational flexibility and the third method finds a trade-off between the first two methods. The algorithms are applied in a case study and the effectivity of the methods is shown by comparing the reduction of operational costs and increased flexibility for different numbers of added HVDC lines.