A fuzzy filtering method applied to power distribution planning

Preliminary filtering of a large decision set can be an important issue in multicriteria problems. Besides eliminating dominated solutions, it is usua l to define aspiration levels in some or all the attributes, and then elimi nate all the solutions that do not respect the imposed limits. This procedu re may lead to the undesired elimination of possibly interesting solutions, due to the irrelevant violation of a specified limit. In this paper, a new method is presented that overcomes this problem by def ining the concept of accepted solution as a fuzzy set and calculating a deg ree of acceptance for each solution that takes values in the interval [0, 1 ] instead of having only the crisp {0, 1} values. The method also deals wit h fuzzy attributes, and has an additional feature of advising the decision maker regarding the definition of the acceptance level that leads to select ion or exclusion of an alternative. To illustrate the application of the fuzzy filtering method (FFM), a planni ng problem in the area of power distribution systems is used. The example s hows how FFM can be used to reduce an initial set of 48 plans, according to the expressed aspiration levels. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.