Towards next-generation energy planning decision-making: An expert-based framework for intelligent decision support

Achieving sustainable energy planning and development involves complex decision-making processes. The energy planning decision-making (EPDM) field relies on a plethora of decision analysis methods that offered many solutions to process a variety of energy management and strategic decision-making problems. However, current EPDM solutions are unable to overcome the increasing complexity of strategic energy planning situations involving a large number of stakeholders in uncertain, dynamic, and distributed environments. This raises significant new challenges for researchers in both decision sciences and renewable and sustainable energy planning. On the basis of a representative assortment of peer-reviewed related literature selected by querying multiple electronic databases and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science databases domain journals over the last 12 years, this paper exhaustively highlights and discusses limitations of existing strategic EPDM solutions. The analysis is based on a classification specially developed by holistically harmonizing important domain concepts to categorize the considered representative sample of the field of interest. Additionally, this paper integrates results and conclusions from some recent and most cited literature reviews to (i) formulate essential evidence as well as practical and conclusive literature's support– alongside with the formulated representative sample –to this paper's subsequent insights and statements, and (ii) guarantee that no relevant articles have been excluded. A total of 78 related works is gathered and analyzed to provide a general view and discussion on major complexities found in classical/traditional strategic EPDM solutions and challenges for next-generation EPDM solutions. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the two solutions and a set of “quality indexes” of a next-generation EPDM solution were identified and some proposals were made to improve future applicative research. As an original result coming from the “quality indexes” identified through the review process, an intelligent expert-based framework for next-generation EPDM solutions is developed for enhanced renewable and sustainable energy planning.