Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Based on Combined Vague Sets in Electrical Outages Problems

The nature of electrical distribution systems is changing from simple markets towards competitive markets. The modern distribution system must simultaneously be reliable, flexible, and cost conscious. One of the main factors that affect the reliability of power systems is outages. With all efforts that have been done, the existence of outages is a reality. Management of electrical outages is a necessity and in outage times we need some appropriate decision makings. In this paper we propose an integrated, quantitative methodology based on vague sets to assist the distribution systems in making these decisions. This methodology allows information on the suppliers and customers to be expressed either qualitatively or quantitatively to use a multi-criteria decision making model and provide new functions to measure the degree of accuracy in the grades of membership of each alternative with respect to a set of criteria represented by vague values.