Human-in-the-loop MGA to generate energy system design options matching stakeholder needs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lombardi, Francesco, Pfenninger, Stefan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Lombardi, Francesco
Pfenninger, Stefan
author_facet Lombardi, Francesco
Pfenninger, Stefan
contents The common use of cost minimisation to support energy system design decisions hides from view many economically comparable design options that stakeholders may prefer. Modelling to generate alternatives (MGA) is increasingly popular as a way to go beyond least-cost designs, providing stakeholders with diverse portfolios to appraise. However, generating all the feasible designs is not computationally viable; modellers must choose what design features to generate diversity around, despite not knowing which trade-offs matter the most in practice. Therefore, MGA alone cannot ensure the generation of design options that match stakeholder needs. To address this shortcoming, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach that automatically integrates stakeholder preferences into MGA. We elicit preferences by letting stakeholders interact with a tentative MGA design space. Hence, we decode those preferences to feed them back to the MGA algorithm and perform a guided search. This search produces a human-trained design space with more designs that mirror the elicited preferences. A synthetic experiment for the Portuguese energy system shows that HITL-MGA may facilitate consensus formation, promising to accelerate technically and socially feasible energy transition decisions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_14353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-in-the-loop MGA to generate energy system design options matching stakeholder needs
Lombardi, Francesco
Pfenninger, Stefan
Physics and Society
The common use of cost minimisation to support energy system design decisions hides from view many economically comparable design options that stakeholders may prefer. Modelling to generate alternatives (MGA) is increasingly popular as a way to go beyond least-cost designs, providing stakeholders with diverse portfolios to appraise. However, generating all the feasible designs is not computationally viable; modellers must choose what design features to generate diversity around, despite not knowing which trade-offs matter the most in practice. Therefore, MGA alone cannot ensure the generation of design options that match stakeholder needs. To address this shortcoming, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach that automatically integrates stakeholder preferences into MGA. We elicit preferences by letting stakeholders interact with a tentative MGA design space. Hence, we decode those preferences to feed them back to the MGA algorithm and perform a guided search. This search produces a human-trained design space with more designs that mirror the elicited preferences. A synthetic experiment for the Portuguese energy system shows that HITL-MGA may facilitate consensus formation, promising to accelerate technically and socially feasible energy transition decisions.
title Human-in-the-loop MGA to generate energy system design options matching stakeholder needs
topic Physics and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14353