A decision support system for economically optimal plan of distributed energy systems

Planning of distributed energy systems is a challenging task, involving a lot of technical, economic, environmental and political factors. In this study, an optimization model based decision support system and the relevant software package have been developed to provide comprehensive analysis of economic, energetic and environmental issues within a distributed energy system framework. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model where the objective is to minimize the overall cost of the distributed energy system including both investing and running costs. By using a user friendly interface, the system can be used without the necessary to have special expertise and knowledge on energy system planning and decision analysis. In addition, besides the distributed energy system planning, it can be also used for examining and visualizing impacts of local energy and environmental policies, regional development policies, and climate change within a local framework.