A comprehensive review on applications of multicriteria decision-making methods in power and energy systems

Energy has been considered as one of the essential needs of mankind along with air, water, and food and witnessed evolution of civilization since evidence of human life. Managing energy resources is one of the challenging problems being capital intensive. Addressing this involves critical thinking and decision making with all possible aspects, technically known as set of primary and secondary criteria. There exist a number of literature sources addressing applications of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) in different energy-related areas. Some are focusing on energy policy making, few are explaining site selection of solar PV, wind farm, and hydro power plants, and a few are describing applications in load management. Moreover, a few literature in this field elaborates various MCDM methods and their applications. In this article, an extensive and exhaustive study is carried out incorporating almost all possible applications of MCDM in renewable energy area. Various energy-intensive applications are mapped with MCDM methods along with governing sensitive parameters. Hence, this study facilitates practicing engineers, decision-makers, academician, and researchers to identify areas and MCDM techniques researched over the past decade in energy sector for planning, managing, selecting renewable resources, etc.