Comparison of meta-heuristics for the planning of meshed power systems

The power system planning task is a combinatorial optimization problem. The objective function minimizes the economic costs subject to a set of technical and operational constraints. Meta-heuristics are often used as optimization strategies to find solutions to this problem by combining switching, line reinforcement or new line measures. Common heuristics are genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), hill climbing (HC), iterated local search (ILS) or newer methods such as grey wolf optimizer (GWO) or fireworks algorithm (FWA). In this paper, we compare these algorithms within the same framework. We test each algorithm on 8 different test grids ranging from 73 to 9421 buses. For each grid and algorithm, we start 50 runs with a maximum run time of 1 hour. The results show that the performance of an algorithm depends on the initial grid state, grid size and amount of measures. The ILS method is very robust in most cases. In the larger test grids, more exploratory heuristics, e.g., GA and PSO, find solutions in shorter run times.