Power System Resource Planning is the recurrent process of studying and determining what facilities and procedures should be provided to satisfy and promote appropriate future demands for electricity. The electric power system as planned should meet or balance societal goals. These include availability of electricity to all potential users at lowest possible cost, minimum environmental damage, high levels of safety and reliability, etc. Plans should be technically and financially feasible. Plans also should achieve the objectives the entity doing the planning, including minimizing risk. The emergence of meta-heuristics has given robustness to the non-analytical methods, because of the rationale behind them. Besides, evolutionary algorithms have provided a higher degree of confidence in a stochastic convergence to optimum and have supported this confidence with a mathematical background explaining not only how they achieve convergence but also how to improve the convergence rate. The present work of analyses and implementation can be divided into: i) Transmission Constrained Generation Expansion Planning (TC GEP), ii) Composite Generation Expansion and Transmission Network Expansion Planning (GEP TNEP), iii) Transmission Network Expansion (TNEP) Planning using AC model, iv) Composite Transmission Network Expansion Planning (TNEP) and Reactive Power Expansion Planning (RPP) and v) Transmission Network Planning using Interior-Point Method (IP TNEP).

Comment: Master's thesis, Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India, May 2011