Inventory-theory-based Interval Stochastic Programming And Its Application To Beijing’s Electric-power System Planning

Currently, more than half of the electricity relies primarily on fossil fuels due to their economic advantages over nuclear and renewable energy resources. Therefore, comprehensive and ambitious plans are desired for planning coal-power generation systems. However, reasonable planning is challenging with a variety of complexities and uncertainties that have to be considered by decision makers, including structure of generation system, temporal and/or spatial variations in system factors, dynamics of system conditions, as well as the associated environmental and social impacts. Moreover, various uncertainties exist in electric-power generation activities, such as energy transferring, storage, conversion and supply, which further multiply the complexities in decisions making. Thus, it is essential to develop robust approaches for effectively managing electric-power generation systems under such complexities and uncertainties.In this study, an inventory-theory-based interval stochastic programming (IB-ISP) model is proposed through incorporating stochastic programming and interval parameters within an inventory model. IB-ISP can tackle system uncertainties expressed as probabilistic distributions and interval parameters in constraints and objective function. The developed IB-ISP is applied to long-term electric generation power systems planning of Beijing studied to reveal the applicability of this method. During coal-transport processes, various factors may affect the time-consumption of coal-transport, leading to uncertainties in energy inventory. Under different delay times of coal-transport, different safety stocks and inventory patterns are generated to minimize system cost and ensure the normal operation of the power plants. The results obtained can not only help the managers to identify desired policies for safety stock in decision making problems, but also be used for minimizing system cost and generating desired inventory pattern (the transferring batch and period). Compared with the traditional economic order quantity (EOQ) model, the IB-ISP model can provide an effective measure for not-timely coal supplying problem and reducing production risks under uncertainty.