Solving Transmission Expansion Planning problem to Mitigate Cascading Failure Impacts using Transmission Network Vulnerability Analysis and Assessment approach

In Recent years, it has been mentioned that the Transmission Expansion Planning is an effective way to mitigate the cascading failure impacts in transmission network. Also, solving transmission expansion planning with cascading failure issues via analytical and assessment approach instead of optimization approach causes that the impacts of cascading failure are more effectively mitigated. The Analytical and assessment approach offers a set of critical lines as a suitable candidate placement of new lines. However, installing new lines for all of elements of the set of critical line is an impractical and uneconomical way. In order to overcome this drawback, a new method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on introducing a vulnerable area in transmission network instead of providing a set of critical lines. The vulnerable area is provided via finding the most vulnerable line and considering a bus farther way (adjacent bus) strategy. All of possible transmission expansion plan at this area are considered to find the best transmission expansion plan. Moreover, a transmission network solidification index based on transmission network vulnerability index is proposed in this paper to rank the possible transmission expansion plans at the vulnerable area. The efficiency and feasibility of the proposed method is investigated at IEEE 39-Bus test system. The numerical results show that using the proposed approach is able to mitigate cascading failure impacts in transmission network.