| Abstract |
Coal is the backbone of the world's power generation, delivering about 38% of our electricity needs. Its use is expected to remain stable in the short term, with developing countries responsible for most of the increase in coal demand. However, coal-fired power plants contribute significantly to carbon dioxide emissions, with global climate change implications leading the United Nations (UN) to formulate a sustainable development goal (SDG7) to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all. As this goal is dependent on the quality of fuel used in these plants, this paper considers a multi-objective fuel procurement planning model based on sustainability criteria comprising of economic, social, and environmental aspects. Unlike the conventional multi-objective optimization techniques for handling equally weighed non-substitutable criteria, the paper proposes a control criterion (CC) based interactive max-min approach that reshapes the feasible solution space, bypassing trade-offs to generate competitive solutions (CSs) for the model. The methodology takes into account a compensatory parameter lying in the range of 0 to 1 for possible improvement of the CSs in terms of nondominance. Thus, the model provides flexibility to the decision-maker (DM) by offering multiple CSs from which the most suitable for the anticipated business scenario may be selected. We demonstrate the model by using a case study in the Indian context considering cash-flow generation from the plant as the CC. |