The unbundling of the electricity industry introduced new uncertainties and escalated the existing ones in transmission expansion planning. In this paper, a multi-stage transmission expansion methodology is presented using a multi-objective optimization framework with internal scenario analysis. Total social cost (TSC), maximum regret (robustness criterion), and maximum adjustment cost (flexibility criterion) are considered as three optimization objectives. Uncertainties are considered by defining a number of scenarios. To overcome the difficulties in solving the nonconvex and mixed integer optimization problem, the genetic-based Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA II) is used. Then, fuzzy decision making is applied to obtain the optimal solution. The planning methodology is applied to the Iranian 400-kV transmission grid to show feasibility of the proposed algorithm.

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