Evolutionary multiobjective design of an alternative energy supply system

The purpose of alternative energy supply systems is to produce electrical energy at the location of its consumption, independently from the supply grid, and exploiting renewable energy sources, such as sunlight and wind. Rapidly changing conditions on energy markets and strengthening environmental requirements make alternative energy supply systems more and more favored. However, designing such systems is a hard optimization problem because of numerous decision variables, conflicting criteria, and complex evaluation of the candidate designs. There are reports on techno-economic optimization of alternative energy supply systems in the literature that search for optimal system configurations maximizing technical performance and minimizing the overall costs. The authors employ stochastic optimization methods integrated with numerical models of the energy supply systems, and handle multiobjective optimization problems in the singleobjective manner through the weighted sum approach or transformation of selected criteria into constraints. This paper describes a Pareto multiobjective approach to techno-economic optimization of an alternative energy supply system based on differential evolution for multiobjective optimization. The paper reviews the related work, introduces the applied methodology and the considered problem, describes the experimental setup and the performed numerical experiments, and reports on the optimization results.