A Novel MS Excel Tool for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis in Energy Systems

Introduction

Due to technical advances, contemporary energy systems are increasingly getting complex with different energy sources and consumer types. This situation naturally poses challenges to system designers, researchers and policy makers due to too many variables, cost options, several possible options of combinations and configurations of system components. Then niche concepts such smart cities, circular economy, green technology concepts etc., suggest eco-friendly solutions to the designers. Then, regulatory standards and expectations in the use of energy sources and even materials in construction sector also pose additional challenges. Many of these technical advances such as fourth industrial revolution, opportunities and challenges have been dealt with various researchers over the years in wider areas of energy systems, transportation systems and construction of buildings etc. For instance, researchers have dealt with numerous, different computational strategies and domain aspects related to energy systems such as - identification of suitable renewable energy source, location of a power plant, optimal mix of energies to feed into the grid etc. Similarly, optimal design of transport systems has been explored with various computational approaches. Prominently design and construction of buildings with various environmental friendly, green materials and optimal configurations also have been considered by researchers. Specifically, smart cities are expected to be environmental friendly and thus developing energy resources to smart cities with minimal carbon footprint is imperative (KS Sastry, Musti, 2020a). Whatever may be the area of study, use of optimization studies has become a norm in the planning and design phases of modern systems. Specifically, such studies have identified the need of using multi-objective optimization criteria, since many of the variables and parameters are very different from one another. For instance, some of the variables in energy systems such as – levelized cost, capacity factor, requirement of land area, environmental friendliness, socio-economic impact etc., are different from one another; and even some of such variable may not have measurable units. Thus, it is not always possible to attach units of measurement to every parameter. Similarly, parameters like professional perceptions and/or opinion of users on aesthetics etc., cannot be measured with known units and rather are represented with a number on a scale, let us say 0 to 10. This has led to the use of Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) tools in decision making process or even in the case of optimization processes. In the recent past, MCDM tools have become a standard choice where participating variables are dissimilar from one another. Several different MCDM approaches do exit that can address multiple conflicting objectives and criteria. Nonetheless, not all MCDM approaches are suitable for use for all the situations, and/or research problems.

Given the fact of availability of different MCDM methods, there will always be a question on selection of appropriate method for a given area of study. Further, a classical question always comes into the minds of users about the possible outcome if all these methods applied independently to a given problem. The fact is that several published articles have described the computational processes and application of these methods; and even comparison of some methods with another. A few papers have suggested the use of MS-Excel as a platform to implement some of the computational approaches and a very few spreadsheets based tools are available for specific methods. That said, it can be seen that there is no open-source software tool that provides a computational platform for researchers or policy makers to understand the nature of methods and/or to study the effectiveness of these MCDM. From the above, a few aspects can be understood.

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  Energy researchers and policy makers have a significant interest in MCDM

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  MS-Excel is being used as a platform to implement the MCDM

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  Application of MCDM in energy studies is of significant interest to many

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  At present, there is no single software tool that can apply different MCDM

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  There is an immense need to develop such software tool to assist researchers and policy makers in applying MCDM.