Multi-Criteria Optimal Planning for Energy Policies in CLP
This work addresses energy policy makers by offering a tool to integrate economic, environmental, and social factors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Strategic Environmental Assessment methods.
The paper tackles the problem of energy policy planning by developing a decision support system that provides optimal and Pareto optimal plans with environmental assessments, enabling visual comparison of policies.
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.