Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) Applications in Optimizing Multi-Objective Energy System Performance

Abstract

Today, the ever-increasing load demand all over the world has caused the generation sector to look for expanding and reinforcing the existing network. In this respect, a planning problem should be exactly designed and solved by the planning entity. Such problems are modeled as optimization problems, and traditionally aimed at minimizing the cost. However, there are also other severe concerns, mainly relating to the environmental issues, reliability of the system, energy losses, voltage security, and stability issues. Each of the mentioned items should individually be addressed in power systems’ operation and planning paradigm, leading to introducing optimization problems with more than one objective function. Thus, single-objective optimization tools would not meet the requirements of modern power systems, and optimization methods with the capability of handling two or more objective functions, namely “multi-objective optimization methods,” must be applied to such problems. Solving a multi-objective optimization problem, unlike the single-optimization one, would provide the decision maker with a variety of solutions, which are all optimal, called “Pareto optimal solutions, Pareto optimal front, or Pareto set.” At this stage, the decision maker is supposed to pick an optimal solution among the obtained ones. To this end, various effective multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tools have already been designed. Accordingly, this chapter proposes a comprehensive review on some well-known multi-objective optimization methods and conducts a review on recent multi-objective optimization problems in the area of energy systems. Besides, the most applicable MCDM techniques, e.g., fuzzy satisfying method, VIseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR), technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and analytic network process (ANP) are introduced and described in detail.