A hierarchical approach to electric utility planning

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP), designed to examine the mutual dependence of various factors that lead to a decision, is applied to deal with the uncertainty in electric utility planning. This is a procedure useful for quantifying various divergencies of opinions, practices and events that lead to the planning uncertainty. A brief summary of AHP is presented in this paper, which includes the basic formulation and intuitive justification for AHP. AHP is compared with the Delphi technique which has also been used for planning with ill-defined parameters. Finally, an example problem showing the application of AHP in electric utility planning under uncertainty is presented.