Abstract--The reconstruction of power industries has brought fundamental changes to both power system operation and planning. This paper presents a new planning method using multi-objective optimization (MOOP) technique, as well as human knowledge, to expand the transmission network in open access schemes. The method starts with a candidate pool of feasible expansion plans. Consequent selection of the best candidates is carried out through a MOOP approach, of which multiple objectives are tackled simultaneously, aiming at integrating the market operation and planning as one unified process in context of deregulated system. Human knowledge has been applied in both stages to ensure the selection with practical engineering and management concerns. The expansion plan from MOOP is assessed by reliability criteria before it is finalized. The proposed method has been tested with the IEEE 14-bus system and relevant analyses and discussions have been presented.Index Terms--Electricity market, Transmission planning, Multi-objective optimization, goal programming I. NOMENCLATURE Z. Y. Dong, is with The School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia (e-mail: zdong@itee.uq.edu.au).K. P. Wong is with The Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong (e-mail: eekpwong@polyu.edu.hk). penalty factor associated with load curtailment ; s node-branch incidence matrix; f vector of active-power flows through the lines; g vector of generated active power; T 2 and competitive electricity markets, but also in the retail supply sector of both transmission and distribution.Since the transmission network is of vital importance in connecting individual generators with the system and enabling necessary competitions in electricity supply, various deregulation approaches have been adopted in different countries. However, the reform in transmission network involves a number of complexities and many new issues have surfaced, such as transmission costing and pricing, payment allocation, power wheeling and congestion management, available power transfer capabilities, the natural monopoly status of transmission networks and transmission rights etc [1]. Among them, the transmission network expansion planning (TNEP) poses particularly a difficult question in the newly deregulated environment, which is the main focus of this paper.Traditionally, the system operator is solely responsible for system operation and planning. By setting their objectives separately, the operators used to run the systems to minimize costs or losses, and plan the expansion to minimize investments in a centralized manner, while fulfilling the obligation of energy supply with reliability requirements [3,4]. The transmission planning problem, though dynamic in nature, is often simplified by the planning engineer, to a static optimization model, minimizing the total investment of network expansion for a single future situation, subject to operation...