Application of ant colony optimization to transmission network expansion planning with security constraint

This paper presents an application of ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the static transmission network expansion planning (STNEP) problem based on DC power flow model considering security constraint. The main objective is to minimize the investment cost of transmission lines that should be added to an existing network in order to supply the forecasted load as economically as possible subject to physical and economic constraints. Two test systems i.e. the Garver 6 buses system and the 46 buses of South Brazilian system are applied to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method. The results obtained by ACO are compared to those obtained by the conventional approaches such as genetic algorithm (GA) and tabu search (TS). The results show that the ACO method outperforms other methods in terms of convergence characteristic and computation efficiency.