Transmission Expansion Planning with Re-design - A Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure

Transmission expansion planning with re-design has been recently proposed in the literature to improve on the classical transmission expansion planning by allowing to cut-off circuits while expanding the network. Although the reductions in the solution costs are significant, the resulting mixed-integer linear programming formulations are very difficult to solve exactly for large networks. In this work, we propose the first metaheuristic for the transmission expansion planing problem with re-design: a simple yet efficient GRASP metaheuristic. We show on realistic networks for which the optimal solutions are known that our method is able to provide in short amounts of time feasible solutions as cheap as the optimal ones. Moreover, we are able to compute a new feasible solution for benchmark instance Brazil Southeast that is cheaper than the best solution from the literature.