Optimal Hierarchical Decision-Making for Heat Source Selection of District Heating Systems

With the rapid development of China’s urbanization, the proportion between the heating consumption and the energy consumption of the whole society keeps rising in recent years. For a district heating system, the selection of the heat source makes significant impact on the energy efficiency and the pollutant emissions. By integrating the methods of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), a multiple-attribute decision-making scheme for the heat source selection of district heating systems is proposed in this paper. As a core part of this scheme, a comprehensive benefit index with hierarchical parallel structure is constructed. The economic benefit, environment benefit, and technical benefit can be reflected with a certain percentage in the comprehensive benefit index. To test the efficiency of the proposed scheme, a case study for a large-scale district heating system in Beijing is carried out, where five kinds of heat sources (water source heat pump, ground source heat pump, gas-fired boiler, coal-fired boiler, and oil-fired boiler) are taken into account. The analysis and instructions for the final sorting result are also demonstrated.