Maintenance Contractor Selection for Small Hydropower Project: a Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Optimization Technique Approach

Abstract

Small hydropower projects (SHP) are emerging as solution for sustainable, eco-friendly, long term and cost-effective water or renewable energy resource for future. Selecting the appropriate small hydropower project and its parameters in which to invest is a critical task involving different factors as they are very unique and site specific. Hence such decision-making can be viewed as a multi-criteria optimization problem with correlating criteria and alternatives. This task should take into consideration several conflicting aspects because of the increasing complexity of the socio-political, technological, environmental and economic factors. Traditional single criteria decision-making approaches cannot handle the complexity of such systems. Multi-criteria optimization or MCDA or MCDM methods may provide a better and flexible tool. This paper aims to evaluate applicability of multi-criteria optimization to decision makers during the small hydropower project maintenance contractor selection. To the best of the author’s knowledge this novel approach for application of multi-criteria optimization in renewable energy project or small hydropower project are absent in renewable energy or water resource or fluid mechanics literature due to its assessment complexity.