Benefits and costs in selecting fuel for municipality heating systems with the Analytic Hierarchy Process

Abstract

Municipal economy problems are of a complex nature. Existing requirements for sustainable development make us apply various criteria while solving these problems. These can, for example, include economic, financial, social and environmental criteria. To handle them effectively, multi-criteria analysis should be applied. Decisions about heat production and delivery systems belong to such multidisciplinary problems. They were usually resolved in the past using classical numerical methodology that took into account only the technical and economic merits of the various alternatives.By applying multi-criteria tools instead it is possible to obtain more realistic results and make more effective decisions. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) seems to be a good alternative to fill the existing gap between decision-making as it is actually practiced and the traditional methods when applied to selecting district heating (DH) systems. This paper presents such an application. Our application is to select the best heat energy source for a DH system for a medium sized city located in Poland. Our results led to an interesting conclusion with regard to the best heat energy source. Our results suggest that intensifying the effort to make widespread the use of more efficient, but financially more costly, energy sources is the best.

Multicriteria Decisions in Urban Energy System Planning: A Review

“…Given the tendency of urban planning to involve wider groups of stakeholders [e.g., in collaborative planning approaches (Teriman et al, 2010;Cajot et al, 2017)], this research question could highlight which methods are most suitable for decisions including large groups. Certain studies reviewed here have been more explicit in describing these stakeholder interactions and could be a starting point for analysis (Yedla and Shrestha, 2003;Nigim et al, 2004;Tzeng et al, 2005;Dytczak and Ginda, 2006;Wang et al, 2011;Vafaeipour et al, 2014). -The multiple uncertainties in the real planning processes (Mirakyan and De Guio, 2013b), as well as the many different approaches to cope with them (Mirakyan and De Guio, 2015) were not treated in this work for time and space limitations.…”

The Decision Model for Selection of Tourism Site Using Analytic Network Process Method

“…Meanwhile, the studies that have linkage in the completion of DSS in ANP issues are such as the selection of a tourism development site involved with GIS and ANP [15], asset maintenance [2], interpretation of criteria weights [9]. Furthermore, issues of ANP method for selection problems such as fuel using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method [16], tourism development site selection ANP and ordered weighted averaging (OWA) method [15], sustainable tourism planning using ANP and GIS [17], the selection of solar-thermal power plant investment projects using AHP and ANP [1], the optimization of marketing strategy selection using ANP and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) [18], decision-making model for the stock market [19], group decision-making using fuzzy approach for evaluating criteria of electrician [20], tourist hotel selection using AHP [21] and geographical visualization approach on tourism issues. From some approaches of related studies, we need to modify the weighing method in ANP and display GIS-based tourism sites.…”

MC Optimization of Maintenance Policy

“…Economic issues with regard to energy source / fuel availability play a very important role nowadays [2]. Energy generation in Poland is based mainly on local natural treasurecoal.…”

“…Results obtained using criteria (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6) are presented in tab.3 (values in parentheses denote the performance indices of strategies). It seems that the best strategy is A, because it appears most frequently as the best one.…”