| Summary: | This paper describes a hybrid tool to perform Static Transmission Expansion Planning, STEP, studies and its application to the Garver 6-Bus academic system and to the Southern Brazilian Transmission equivalent real system. The developed STEP tool integrates two phases as follows. The first one uses Constructive Heuristic Algorithms (CHA) to reduce the search space, and the second uses Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to identify the final solution. This hybridization between CHAs and PSO proved to be very effective and shows good performance to reduce the size of the STEP search space and to identify good quality solutions. These are relevant issues given the combinatorial nature of investment problems leading to the explosion of the number of alternative plans, one of the greatest difficulties faced in this planning problem.
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