Dynamic Robust Transmission Expansion Planning

Recent breakthroughs in transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) have demonstrated that the use of robust optimization, as opposed to stochastic programming methods, renders the expansion planning problem considering uncertainties computationally tractable for real systems. However, there is still a yet unresolved and challenging problem as regards the resolution of the dynamic TNEP problem, which considers the year-by-year representation of uncertainties and investment decisions in an integrated way. This problem has been considered to be a highly complex and computationally intractable problem, and most research related to this topic focuses on very small case studies or used heuristic methods and has lead most studies about TNEP in the technical literature to take a wide spectrum of simplifying assumptions. In this paper, an adaptive robust TNEP formulation is proposed for keeping the full dynamic complexity of the problem. The method overcomes the problem size limitations and computational intractability associated with dynamic TNEP for realistic cases. Numerical results from an illustrative example and the IEEE 118-bus system are presented and discussed, demonstrating the benefits of this dynamic TNEP approach with respect to classical methods.