A Framework for Managing Flexible Waste-to-Energy Systems Based on Decision Rules

摘要

This paper presents a framework for managing flexible waste-to-energy (WTE) systems based on decision rules. In the operation of a WTE system, the decision rule is used for decision-makers to adaptively select flexible strategies in response to a changing environment. Compared to the existing methods that use either fixed plans or manually defined rules, our framework adopts an evolutionary approach to automatically optimize decision rules based on the simulation of WTE operation environment. The proposed framework is applied to a case study of an anaerobic digestion WTE system and the decision rule is generated for providing an intuitive guidance to exercise capacity expansion strategy in the given system. The experimental results show that the decision rule being generated based on our framework can help to improve the WTE system's expected net present value compared to the fixed expansion design.