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

Abhishek Kumar, Bikash Sah, Arvind R. Singh, Yan Deng, Xiangning He, Praveen Kumar, R. C. Bansal

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

1197 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)596-609
Number of pages14
JournalRenewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Volume69
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1 2017
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Energy Planning
  • Multiple criteria decision making
  • Renewable Energy
  • Sustainable Development

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