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Finding the most sustainable wind farm sites with a hierarchical outranking decision aiding method

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Abstract

This paper considers the problem of finding suitable sites for wind farms in a region of Catalonia (Spain). The evaluation criteria are structured into a hierarchy that identifies several intermediate sub-goals dealing with different points of view. Therefore, the recent ELECTRE-III-H hierarchical multi-criteria analysis method is proposed as a good solution to help decision-makers. This method establishes an order among the set of possible sites for the wind farms for each sub-goal. ELECTRE-III-H aggregates these orders into an overall order using different parameters. The procedure is based on the construction and exploitation of a pairwise outranking relation, following the principles of concordance (i.e. majority rule) and discordance (i.e. respect for the minority opinions). This paper makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to the ELECTRE-III-H method by studying its mathematical properties for the construction of outranking relations. Second, the case study is solved and its results show that we can effectively represent and manage the overall influence of the various criteria on the global result at different levels of the hierarchy. The paper compares different scenarios with strict, normal, and optimistic preference, indifference and veto thresholds. Results show that the best site differs for technical, economic, environmental, and social intermediate criteria. Therefore, the best overall solution changes depending on the preference and veto thresholds fixed at the intermediate level of the hierarchy.

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Notes

  1. For the sake of simplicity, in the rest of the paper, a notation based on the preference relation between a and b will be used, such that \(c_j(a,b)=c_{j}(a\phi b)\) and \(d_j(a,b)=d_{j}(a\phi b)\).

  2. Autonomous University of Barcelona and centre of Environmental Studies (now called Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies ICTA)

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially funded by the Spanish research projects SHADE (TIN-2012-34369) and INVITE (TIN2016-80049-C2-1-R, TIN2016-80049-C2-2-R), the URV grant 2016PFR-URV-B2-60), and by the Research Grant ACM2015 (Aristos Campus Mundus) by the University Ramon Llull. Dr. Afsordegan is also supported by “Obra Social la Caixa”. The authors would also like to thank to the Research team of the Project (HAR2010-20684-C02-01), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Information Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESADE Business School, Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain

    Arayeh Afsordegan & Núria Agell

  2. Departament d’Enginyeria Informatica i Matematiques, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

    Luis Del Vasto-Terrientes & Aida Valls

  3. Department of Mathematics, UPC-BarcelonaTech, Barcelona, Spain

    Mónica Sánchez

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  1. Arayeh Afsordegan
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  2. Luis Del Vasto-Terrientes
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  3. Aida Valls
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  4. Núria Agell
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  5. Mónica Sánchez
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Correspondence to Aida Valls.

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Afsordegan, A., Del Vasto-Terrientes, L., Valls, A. et al. Finding the most sustainable wind farm sites with a hierarchical outranking decision aiding method. Ann Oper Res 312, 1307–1335 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2590-4

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