A consumer decision-making aid for electricity purchases by possibility regression and fuzzy decision

摘要

In this paper, the authors introduce a decision-making aid for retail consumers of electricity who have a choice of bilateral transaction and market-based purchases under recent deregulated environment. Direct transaction between a supplier andthe consumer may become attractive in some situations because of a fixed price, while in a power exchange market, gaming and speculation of participants may push up electricity prices unacceptably. In this approach, uncertain market prices are represented by the band of fuzzy numbers, containing highest/lowest price range in a time series. The consumer's somewhat vague preference is also defined by a separate fuzzy set. The differences in the offered price for a bilateral contract and the market prices are compared with the preference index. The overall grade of matching the price differential and the consumer's preference indicates the value of the offered price for the bilateral transaction. Numerical examples illustrate the procedure of this approach.