Evaluation of suitable locations for the installation of solar thermoelectric power plants

• Evaluation of optimal sites to implant solar thermoelectric power plants.
• Combination of Soft Computing (SC) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
• Multicriteria Decision Making Method MCDM applied.
• Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method.
• TOPSIS method, linguistic labels for qualitative criterion modeled by fuzzy numbers.

The aim of the present paper is to determine the best location to host a solar thermoelectric power plant. We will seek to show how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) such as the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS method) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), are an excellent combination to solve complex locations problems. The coast of the Region of Murcia in the southeast of Spain has been chosen as the study area to carry out this evaluation.The GIS will be shown to be a very useful tool, since GIS are able to generate a database which serves as a starting point for conducting any decision support system. The posed problem will be resolved using restrictions to reduce the area of study, and the criteria that will influence the decision-making. These criteria will be of different natures; with quantitative criteria (numerical values) coexisting with qualitative criteria (labels and linguistic variables). In this article, AHP will be used to obtain the weights of the criteria, and the fuzzy TOPSIS method for the evaluation of the alternatives. In order to compare the results obtained with TOPSIS, the ELECTRE-TRI methodology will be applied.