Application of multi-criteria decision making to sustainable energy planning - A review

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques are gaining popularity in sustainable energy management. The techniques provide solutions to the problems involving conflicting and multiple objectives. Several methods based on weighted averages, priority setting, outranking, fuzzy principles and their combinations are employed for energy planning decisions. A review of more than 90 published papers is presented here to analyze the applicability of various methods discussed. A classification on application areas and the year of application is presented to highlight the trends. It is observed that Analytical Hierarchy Process is the most popular technique followed by outranking techniques PROMETHEE and ELECTRE. Validation of results with multiple methods, development of interactive decision support systems and application of fuzzy methods to tackle uncertainties in the data is observed in the published literature. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.