In the current era of sustainable development, energy planning has become complex due to the involvement of multiple benchmarks like technical, social, economic and environmental. This in turn puts major constraints for decision makers to optimize energy alternatives independently and discretely especially in case of rural communities. In addition, topographical limitations concerning renewable energy systems which are mostly distributed in nature, the energy planning becomes more complicated. In such cases, decision analysis plays a vital role for designing such systems by considering various criteria and objectives even at disintegrated levels of electrification. Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) is a branch of operational research dealing with finding optimal results in complex scenarios including various indicators, conflicting objectives and criteria. This tool is becoming popular in the field of energy planning due to the flexibility it provides to the decision makers to take decisions while considering all the criteria and objectives simultaneously. This article develops an insight into various MCDM techniques, progress made by considering renewable energy applications over MCDM methods and future prospects in this area. An extensive review in the sphere of sustainable energy has been performed by utilizing MCDM technique.

A review of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) towards sustainable renewable energy development

https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/61956/1/WRAP_Cinelli_1-s2.0-S1470160X14002647-main.pdf

Analysis of the potentials of multi criteria decision analysis methods to conduct sustainability assessment

ELECTRE: A comprehensive literature review on methodologies and applications

A comparative analysis for multiattribute selection among renewable energy alternatives using fuzzy axiomatic design and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

Fuzzy TOPSIS method for ranking renewable energy supply systems in Turkey

This article develops a methodological framework to provide insights regarding the suitability of multi-criteria techniques in the context of renewable energy planning. The second section presents main characteristics of the particular decision-making process. The third section presents the main multi-criteria analysis methods, and the fourth section reveals the requirements of the techniques for renewable energy planning and the main attributes under which these methods should be evaluated. Subsequently, in the fifth section, a comparative matrix is created with the various appropriate multi-criteria techniques and their performance. Finally in the sixth sec tion, we present our conclusions.

Giussepe Munda

Papers

Selecting an Appropriate Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Technique for Renewable Energy Planning