Prioritization of evaluation indices for optimal planning of distribution system: A fuzzy-best-worst approach

At the planning stage of a power distribution system (DS) involving distributed generation (DG), different stakeholders are involved with multiple and conflicting objectives spanning from technical, economic, environmental and social which are required to be assessed and optimised simultaneously. This culminates into a multi-objective problem which is mostly solved using weighted-sum approach. The weight factors of these objectives were usually arbitrarily assumed. Due to the multi-variable nature of these indices (objectives), their weighting factors are better determined using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique. This study presented a systematic approach based on fuzzy-best-worst method involving a group of experts to determine and prioritize the weights of these evaluation indices. The results reveal that for optimal planning of DS, technical based objectives are best prioritised with a weight score of 0.4641. Economic based objective is second best ranked with a weight factor of 0.2590 while environmental (0.1551) and social (0.1218) based indices are third and least prioritized, respectively.