Multi-Stakeholder Decision Support Based on Multicriteria Assessment: Application to Industrial Waste Heat Recovery for a District Heating Network in Grenoble, France

Abstract

The decarbonization and decentralization of district heating networks lead to the shared use of on-site resources by multiple stakeholders. The optimal design of prospective equipment in such contexts should take into account the preferences and objectives of each stakeholder. This article focuses on the adaptation of a 4E multicriteria model (the criteria being energy, exergy, economic, and exergoeconomic) to include and compare the stakeholders’ performance criteria around the technical design. In addition, two graphical supports are proposed that represent and cross-analyze the different stakeholders’ preferred optima. A preliminary implementation of the methodology is illustrated through a study case in France, which features waste heat recovery for district heating utilization. After presenting the results, a discussion is offered on how to complete the methodology with an iterative negotiation procedure to determine the most suitable design. It was concluded, among other considerations, that the relaxation of the stakeholders’ optimality requirements can greatly enable the project’s feasibility. Such a relaxation could be implemented in the form of a joint consortium. In addition, the results showed that stakeholder relaxations of requirements can lead to new solutions that may outperform the best solutions pre-relaxation. Lastly, perspectives are suggested toward verifying whether relaxed requirements from upstream stakeholders might be more impactful than those of downstream stakeholders.