Territory concept to improve transmission expansion planning problem solution algorithms

This paper is devoted to solving transmission expansion planning (tep)problems, via a constructive heuristic algorithm (cha) that can be employed as a subroutinein a meta-heuristic procedure. in such a strategic methodology, cha may improvethe quality of trial solutions that speed up the convergence of the main algorithm. byintroducing a territory concept for each derived local optimum, this paper proposes anapproach, forcing cha sub-procedures to explore new areas in the problem sub-space. suchmodication is enforced on the villasana-garver-salon (vgs) algorithm, as a well-knownkind of cha, to improve its performance. the improved vgs is called territory-basedvgs (tbvgs). in order to evaluate the performance of tbvgs, it is implemented on ameta-heuristic algorithm in which the performance of the obtained meta-heuristic algorithmis examined with dierent standard test systems, as well as practical cases. simulationstudies and result analysis show a promising improvement in the computational eciencyof the algorithm and, even more importantly, in nding a higher quality set of tep localoptimums.