Grey incidence analysis on optimization and comparison of heating methods in Northern China

With the development of economy in China, the energy saving is more and more important. Energy consumption for heating in the residential sector is one of the main parts of the total energy consumption in northern China. Based on the characteristic of grey system theory, which is an effective method to solve uncertain problems, used grey incidence analytic into optimization and comparison of heating methods. The comparison of heating sources includes coal-fired boiler, oil-fired boiler and gas-fired boiler in a residential area. A heating optimization framework based on grey incidence degree was built based on grey incidence analytic method, which considers six indexes to reflecting the heating method. Finally, the grey incidence degree of coal-fired boiler, oil-fired boiler and gas-fired boiler are respectively 0.800, 0.806 and 0.886 when the indexes are coordinately important, which shows the gas-fired boiler is optimization strategy as heating for the discussed project in northern China. The comparison shows that the oil-fired boiler is sensitive to the energy price. In addition the results show that the method is simple and practical; the model provides an effective method to optimization and comparison of heating methods.