Sustainable choice of the location of a biomass plant: an application in Tuscany

The management of complex systems often requires taking decisions that may affect the company's future. Making decisions is not easy and requires you to take serious responsibility. The company character appointed to this task, is the “decision-makers” who, within a job or project, must make a selection among several alternatives. To carry out this task, you must perform a process called "decision analysis". It can be aided by qualitative and quantitative tools, able to rationalize a multifactorial choice and bring it to a judgment of performance parameters more easily comparable. In fact, if this problem is addressed considering only the economic aspects, other fundamental parameters will be neglected such as, for example, the environmental ones. Actually, bringing many different aspects to a simple economic performance, or anyway one-dimensional, proves to be a limiting and unsatisfactory approach. In addition, if we consider the concepts of sustainability, we should at least take into account the three dimensions that describe it, namely the economic, environmental and social issues. Then, a strategy of decision making more complete that could integrate all the three aspects, becomes much more appropriate. In this context, the multi-criteria analysis are particularly suitable for this purpose. In this study we aim at investigating how one of the most popular multi-criteria methods, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) can be used to define the location of a cogeneration plant fuelled by biomass. The novelty of this study consists of having categorized and divided into homogeneous areas an entire region. In addition, to evaluate the economic efficiency, as compared to other authoritative work on the subject, also the water content in the raw material was considered, influencing the amount of biomass consumed. The results show that the ANP allows decisions making according to an overall view, considering a wide variety of parameters and allows the decision makers to better represent the needs of the stakeholders KeywordSustainable development, Analytic Network Process, Energy economics, decision support system.