A Linear Programming-Driven MCDM Approach for Multi-Objective Economic Dispatch in Smart Grids

This paper presents a novel approach to deal with the multi-objective economic dispatch problem in smart grids as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, whose decision alternatives are dynamically generated. Four objectives are considered: emissions, energy cost, distance of supply, and load balancing. Objectives are preliminarily preference-ranked through a fuzzy version of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and then classified into two categories of importance. The more important objectives form the objective function of a linear programming (LP) problem, whose solution (driving solution) drives the generation of Pareto-optimal alternative configurations of power output of the generators. The technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used to automatically select the most suitable power output configuration, according to initial preferences, derived with fuzzy AHP. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by comparing it to the weighted sum (WS) method, by simulating 40 different operating scenarios on a prototype smart microgrid.