Equilibrium strategy based coal blending method for combined carbon and PM10 emissions reductions

Abstract

Atmospheric environmental deterioration has become a significant obstacle to sustainable development, with coal-fired power plants being one of the primary pollution sources. In this paper, to achieve cleaner production, an equilibrium strategy based coal blending method under an uncertain environment is proposed to develop an environmentally-friendly based optimization method that fully considers the relationship between the local authority and the coal-fired power plant. An interactive solution approach that integrates fuzzy expected value and a possibility measure is designed to search for the solutions. The successful use of this model on a real world case demonstrates its practicality and efficiency. Sensitivity analyses under different constraint violation risk levels are also given, which can give the authority insights as to the tradeoffs required between the different decision makers as well as identify the equilibrium between environmental protection and economic development. Compared with previous studies, the proposed method has the ability to combined reduction of multiple air pollutants which include the PM10 and carbon emissions as well as describe the trade-off between different stakeholders. The results demonstrated that as the proposed method can encourage coal-fired power plants to improve emissions performance, it could be of significant assistance to authorities when making decisions.