Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Energy infrastructure planning: the study-case of Natural Gas in Italy

The present study has been developed during a six-months internship at the company E4SMA (Energy Engineering Economic Environment System Modeling and Analysis). The work comes as a comparison and complement of a previous analysis based on mathematical programming (single decision-maker, single objective), with a new one that includes the direct involvement of stakeholders (multiple decision-makers, multiple criteria).
The subject of the study is a complex problem, a middle-term planning for the Italian Natural Gas supply system. The aim is to assess a set of pre-defined alternatives and to provide a platform to help the decision maker in ranking and selecting the options of import infrastructures (pipelines and regasification plants) and national production in order to supply the required amount of gas to Italy, from 2010 to 2030, with respect to 21 different criteria. The study inherits the general formulation of the decisional problem, as well as some data, from the work performed by Jonathan Pérez, Model-based analysis of the Italian natural gas transport infrastructure with special focus on future scenarios using times model generator, whose aim was to develop an energy model to simulate the behavior of Italian natural gas supply infrastructure under different future scenarios, and to solve it reaching the minimal cost able to satisfy the demand assumed. In this work a multicriteria approach is used to take into account the different factors affecting such a decision-making process and to include the different stakeholders’ expectations.
In the first pages a short introduction of the Italian Natural Gas system is presented, with particular reference to future projects and plans. In Chapter 1 an overview of the multicriteria methods and some details on the outranking methodology used are presented, together with a short description of the tool chosen, the Visual Promethee software. The study case is developed in Chapter 2, with a description of the problem structuring and of the steps followed in model building. In Chapter 3 the model is implemented under different scenarios, which are compared and commented. Finally Chapter 4 hosts the conclusions drawn from the implementation of the model and some suggestions for future studies. Moreover, Annex provides all the detailed calculations for the quantitative construction of the alternatives, the evaluation of performances of alternatives over criteria and the outcomes for all scenarios evaluated.