Expansion of the electricity sector and liberalized electricity market leads to more jobs challenging the designer of the transmission network. In order to match with the load growth and generation patterns schemes optimal transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) has to be done. Transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) is one of the important aspects of power system planning. It will find out where, when and how many new transmission lines should be added to the network. In order to meet the load growth and generation patterns to maintain the system reliability, stability, and economic constraints, transmission network expansion planning problem is highly complex in nature. Further, as network size increases system analysis becomes difficult. The objective of TNEP was to minimize the transmission network investment cost required to meet the growing load and the added constraints. From the recent past, renewable energy resources are becoming major attraction part to the power sector. Large-scale integration of distributed generation (DG) affects the electrical industry and as well as the strategy of the transmission network expansion. Static TNEP problem is modeled by using DC power flow model and to solve this problem a population search based algorithm named, Gbest Artificial Bee Colony (GABC) optimization algorithm is proposed. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is evaluated on Garver's 6-bus network, and IEEE 24-bus test system. Results obtained are compared with the previous published literature.
