Multi-Criteria Optimal Planning for Energy Policies in CLP

TL;DR

This paper presents a decision support system that uses multi-criteria optimization to help policymakers evaluate and compare energy policies considering economic, environmental, and social factors, with a focus on Pareto optimal plans.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive system integrating multi-objective optimization, environmental assessment, and visualization for energy policy planning using Constraint Logic Programming.

Findings

Provides Pareto optimal policy sets for decision makers.

Enables visual comparison of policy options.

Incorporates environmental footprint evaluation.

Abstract

In the policy making process a number of disparate and diverse issues such as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy, need to be considered. A single person might not have all the required expertises, and decision support systems featuring optimization components can help to assess policies. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare them. Each plan is environmentally assessed and its footprint is evaluated. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces, and an intuitive graphic user interface.