Multi-criteria optimal planning for Energy policies in CLP

ABSTRACT. The number of issues, stakeholders and regulations that a policy must consider in the current world is so high that trying to address them only with good-will and common-sense is unthinkable. Policy makers have to consider disparate issues, as diverse as economic development, pollution, traffic, as well as the acceptance of the policy from the population, just to name a few. This holds also for relatively low-scale levels, such as the Regional scope, not to mention National or European levels. A single person cannot be expert in all these subjects, and to obtain a suitable policy in the current complex world one can adopt decision support systems featuring optimization components.

Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare plans. While the previous version only considered qualitative information, the new version provides also the environmental footprint of the plan in a quantitative information, considering emissions, global warming effect, human toxicity, and acidification. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces. An intuitive graphic user interface has been added to provide easy access to the web service and the CLP application.