Stochastic multicriteria evaluation of district heating systems considering the uncertainties

Abstract

It is of great importance to choose a suitable district heating (DH) system for a specific DH area from the economics, environment and energy (3E) points of view. This is a multicriteria decision making problem, in which the criteria performance values (PVs) and weighting are characterized by uncertain or imprecise information. In this study, seven candidate DH systems are evaluated from the viewpoints of 3E by the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA) method. SMAA is able to handle the uncertainties of the criteria PVs and the weighting at the same time. These uncertainties are very common and typical in real-life, but in most cases are not treated judiciously or just neglected. In this paper, we propose to use a Probability Distribution Function (PDF), a Monte Carlo simulation in combination with the concept of Feasible Weight Space (FWS) to handle the uncertainties. The model is demonstrated in a case study in China and the results show that the proposed method is capable to give more reliable and flexible results when the uncertainties are considered.