Many-Criteria Evaluation of Infrastructure Investment Priorities for Distribution Network Planning

With the liberalization of incremental distribution network investment business, more and more investment projects from various sources and diversified ownership are eligible for construction applications. This article proposes a many-criteria investment priorities evaluation method for incremental distribution network planning based on the hyperplane projection transformation. In the established many-criteria evaluation indicator system, the multi-grade indicators including economic and technical factors are adopted to comprehensively evaluate the distribution network infrastructure projects. Furthermore, the hyperplane projection transformation is applied to project the solutions from the many-objective hypercube to the normalized hyperplane. Then, the comprehensive distance quantifies the quality and balance of the distribution network infrastructure project indicators, and the investment priority rankings can be obtained. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is validated on six distribution network infrastructure projects with eleven evaluation indicators. The results show that the proposed many-criteria evaluation of infrastructure investment priorities is effective to recognize the non-dominance solutions with extremely good or extremely poor indicators.