In recent years, electricity transmission systems' planning has become a subject of significant discussions worldwide due to increasing investments in renewable power and the need to optimize resources. Planning results directly affect the price of electricity for the final consumers; therefore, it is necessary to determine precise, robust, and relevant plans for the system expansion.Optimization techniques have been successfully employed in several problems associated with transmission line expansion planning, with emphasis on electricity interconnections, routing studies, and tower spotting, among others. The use of these techniques is intended to support planning processes with information that will assist the analyst in the pursuit of defined goals. The present work proposes a methodology based on dynamic programming that seeks to obtain the optimal spotting of transmission towers considering environmental (type of land use, slope, and geotechnical class of the terrain) and engineering characteristics (minimum distance between the electric conductor and ground and tensions supported of each tower type) associated with the problem. The methodology is tested in two different case studies including a real transmission line project with 39 km of extension. The results obtained show, approximately, 3.8% of cost savings obtained using the proposed approach when comparing with the real transmission line project. We also note that it is possible to verify a great similarity between the tower arrangements defined in the real project and the optimal decisions generated by the proposed approach, demonstrating its usefulness as a tool to support decision-making in early stages of investment planning and long-term auctions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.