Application of fuzzy multi-objective decision making in spatial load forecasting

Electric distribution system planning is to provide an economic expansion plan to meet the future demands in its territory. A forecast of the future electric demand and its geographic distribution is a prerequisite for distribution planning. The quality and accuracy of this forecast have a large influence on the quality of the electrical distribution system planning. Spatial load forecasting emerges to provide a more accurate prediction of both the magnitudes and locations of future electric loads. Since the load growth pattern is dominated by its land-use (residential, commercial, or industrial), the land usage study of small area is important to capture the future loads accurately. There are many factors which will affect the customer land-use decision, for example, distance to highway, distance to urban pole, and the costs. The customer's preferences can be estimated based on these objective factors. Then the land utilization and the electricity consumption can be estimated. Since the objectives sometimes are conflicting with each other, it can be cumbersome to use conventional cost function approach to determine the land usage decision. This paper applies a fuzzy multi-objective decision making scheme to the urban redevelopment and spatial load forecasting, which is more naturally and straight forwardly used to handle the spatial load forecasting problem. An example is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.