Search and evaluation of optimal sites to implant renewable energies facilities, combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Soft Computing: case study of the coast of the Region of Murcia

Mission of the project

Doctoral Thesis (PhD  Renewable Energy)

Objectives

Renewable energy facilities, initially driven by a favourable legislative framework due to the need to reduce energy dependence on fossil fuels and later by a progressive extraordinary evolution, have experienced an increasing expansion and development in the Spanish energy sector in recent decades.

The search and selection of optimal locations to implant renewable energy facilities, requires not only to have an advisory group able to assess and analyze alternatives, but it is appropriate to apply a set of tools and methods to facilitate the decision making process. The locating problem of renewable energy facilities is a complex problem because it needs to handle a great variety of criteria with different nature and origin, as well as to evaluate, in most cases, a large number of alternatives. For this, multicriteria decision methods are the main methods to tackle this problem by combining them, on the one hand with Geographic Information Systems that will be used as support database to our problem, and on the other hand, with Soft Computing tools applied in the own decision methodologies which give them the uncertainty modeling and vagueness of the data used in this type of problems.

In particular and as an example of application, in this investigation the combination of multicriteria decision methods with Geographic Information Systems is proposed as support database, and Soft Computing (specifically the Fuzzy Logic) for the search and evaluation of optimal locations to implant renewable energy facilities on the coast of the Region of Murcia.

Project milestones

Search and evaluation of optimal sites to implant renewable energies facilities in the coast of the Region of Murcia

Bibliography

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