Methods selection and overall process of distribution network planning comprehensive evaluation

Distribution network planning is an important constituent of overall urban planning. It is advantageous to the improvement of decision-making level and benefit of investment through performing comprehensive assessment on planning schemes. Comprehensive evaluation of distribution network planning is a multiple attribute decision making problem. The typical methods to solve this problem include analytic hierarchy process (AHP), data envelopment analysis (DEA), and technology for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), etc. It is of significance to select appropriate methods according to specific distribution network planning. For the first time, this paper proposes that evaluation methods could be selected according to three attributes of the evaluation object, including preference information, scheme number and the comparison between scheme number and index number. In the distribution network planning assessment, indices are not equally important. So it is a problem how to determine the preference information. The object´ s scheme number could be either single or multiple, and the scheme number is normally less than the index number. Based on these characteristics, the suitable methods for distribution network planning are analytic hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) and the delphi method (DM). The overall process of distribution network planning assessment using the selected methods is also proposed, including construction of index system, setting of index weight, setting of index score standard, analysis of the evaluation results and so on. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by analysis on actual distribution network planning schemes for a certain region in 2015. The results, which can be used for similar evaluation work, will be of great value in real applications.