Title: A novel approach for efficiency assessment of conventional power plants based on principal component analysis

Authors: Ali Azadeh, Mahmoud Ghiasi Moaser

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, Center of Excellence for Intelligent Based Experimental Mechanics; Department of Engineering Optimization Research, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, P.O. Box 11365-4563, Tehran, Iran. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, Center of Excellence for Intelligent Based Experimental Mechanics; Department of Engineering Optimization Research, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, P.O. Box 11365-4563, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: The investigation of performance efficiency and productivity in power generation sector has become a need due to the importance of energy consumption in the world. Several studies have concentrated on the performance assessment of conventional power plants through mathematical and statistical methods. This paper presents a novel approach based on principal component analysis (PCA) for efficiency assessment of conventional power plants. This study considers the previous approaches, namely: data envelopment analysis (DEA) and PCA for ranking of decision-making units (DMUs). The applicability and superiority of the proposed approach is shown for 15 actual conventional power plants. We also applied the proposed approach to other datasets in previous studies to show its advantages. The numerical results showed that the proposed approach provides better solution than previous studies. It has been shown that in some cases the effect of the number of efficient units is contrary to what previous studies have already predicted. Moreover, the results of the novel approach provide better rankings than previous studies.

Keywords: efficiency assessment; data envelopment analysis; DEA; principal component analysis; PCA; correlation; power plants; energy consumption; decision making units; Iran; electricity generation; productivity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2010.034407

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2010 Vol.6 No.2, pp.231 - 248

Published online: 02 Aug 2010 *

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