A multi-objective competitive-design framework for fuel procurement planning in coal-fired power plants for sustainable operations

Abstract

Coal is the backbone of the world's power generation, delivering about 38% of our electricity needs. Its use is expected to remain stable in the short term, with developing countries responsible for most of the increase in coal demand. However, coal-fired power plants contribute significantly to carbon dioxide emissions, with global climate change implications leading the United Nations (UN) to formulate a sustainable development goal (SDG-7) to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. As this goal is dependent on the quality of fuel used in these plants, this paper considers a multi-objective fuel procurement planning model based on sustainability criteria comprising of economic, social, and environmental aspects. Unlike the conventional multi-objective optimization techniques for handling equally weighed non-substitutable criteria, the paper proposes a control criterion (CC) based interactive max-min approach that reshapes the feasible solution space, bypassing trade-offs to generate competitive solutions (CSs) for the model. The methodology takes into account a compensatory parameter lying in the range of 0 to 1 for possible improvement of the CSs in terms of non-dominance. Thus, the model provides flexibility to the decision-maker (DM) by offering multiple CSs from which the most suitable for the anticipated business scenario may be selected. We demonstrate the model by using a case study in the Indian context considering cash-flow generation from the plant as the CC.