Planejamento da expansão de sistemas de transmissão através de otimização por colônia de formigas

Abstract

Electric energy utilities around the world have made use of interactive methodologies, in order to plan the expansion of their systems, based on deterministic criteria such as the “N-1”. Usually, it can be observed the lack of more sophisticated methodologies based on optimization models, which can significantly reduce the number of expansion alternatives to be appreciated by planners and, consequently, provide the most adequate solutions bearing in mind the cost-benefit relation. This procedure can become a very interesting planning option that should be assimilated by utilities of the world electric sector in the coming years. In the specific case of the Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP), it is recognized that this problem has a huge complexity not only due to the dimension of the actual systems but also to the involved uncertainties, which include those related with the new rules of electric energy markets. The TEP problem has been treated at two environments: static and dynamic. In the static case, the best expansion alternatives are evaluated conditioned to a specific year of the planning horizon, while in the dynamic case, the whole expansion period is taken into account. Bearing in mind the complexity of the TEP problem, heuristic and metaheuristic models have shown promising results. The success of these models is related to their ability of avoiding local minima and, therefore, exploring a wide region within the possible range of each problem. This Dissertation presents a new methodology to solve the TEP problem based on the metaheuristic known as Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The main objective is to obtain the set of best transmission expansion alternatives, in the long term, using the ACO metaheuristic. All studies are carried out considering a deterministic framework, at both environments: static and dynamic. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated through its application to a test system and also to a real subtransmission network.