Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach for Hybrid Operation of Wind Farms

Hybrid operation of wind farms has been in the limelight in recent years wherein the stochastic nature of wind causes market operators to choose an optimal strategy to maximize profit. The current work deals with a multi-criteria decision making approach to choose the best possible alternatives for a hybrid wind farm operation. A set of three, non-beneficial criteria, namely wind wakes, wind curtailment, and forced outages, were chosen to evaluate the best alternative. Three methods, (i) Simple Additive Weighting (SAW), (ii) the Technique for Order or Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and (iii) Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS), were applied to identify the best alternative, and the results revealed that for all three methods, borrowing deficit power from a neighboring wind farm is the best alternative. Comparative analyses in terms of the data requirement, the effect of dynamic decision matrices, and rank reversal in wind farm application have also been pioneered.