A Strategic Decision Support System for Electric Utility Company in a Competitive Environment

This paper describes an expert system (ES) based decision support system (DSS), which aids the user to select feasible projects among a strategic portfolio supplied by a dynamic simulator. The purpose of developing a DSS embbeded in na ES structure, is to search for the modelling of the decision-maker rather than the decision process. Thus, the ES stores not only the expertise from engineers of the utility, but some knowledge about the company goals. The dynamic simulator (DS) was developed by using the system dynamics paradigm, allowing the simulation of investment policies, taking into account the dynamic behavior of the involved variables and assuming that the decisions are taken continuously, leading to continuous actions. The proposed DSS is integrated with a strategic database (SDB), which contains information about competitors, regulatory system, special consumers and the energy wholesale market in general, forming an integrated computational system. The ES manages the integration between the DSS and the SDB, retrieving the information necessary to the simulation in progress. The ES tries to match this acquired knowledge with the performance indices calculated by the simulator, searching for infering conclusions in order to support the decision-making process, with regards the selection of coherent business opportunities. Thus the developed ES plays a strategic role in this system.