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A prize collecting Steiner tree approach to least cost evaluation of grid and off-grid electrification systems

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  • Bolukbasi, Gizem
  • Kocaman, Ayse Selin

Abstract

The lack of access to electricity in developing countries necessitates spatial electricity planning for guiding sustainable electrification projects that evaluate the costs of centralized systems vis-a-vis decentralized systems. Heuristic approaches have been widely used in such electrification problems to find feasible, cost effective solutions; however, most of the time global optimality of these solutions is not guaranteed. Our paper through its modeling approach provides a new methodology to find the least cost solution to this electrification problem. We model the spatial network planning problem as Prize Collecting Steiner Tree problem, which would be a base for a decision support tool for rural electrification. This new method is systematically assessed using both randomly generated data and real data from rural regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Comparative results for the proposed approach and a widely used heuristic method are presented based on computational experiments.

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  • Bolukbasi, Gizem & Kocaman, Ayse Selin, 2018. "A prize collecting Steiner tree approach to least cost evaluation of grid and off-grid electrification systems," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 536-543.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:160:y:2018:i:c:p:536-543
    DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.07.029
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    Cited by:

    1. Daniel Rehfeldt & Thorsten Koch, 2022. "On the Exact Solution of Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problems," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 34(2), pages 872-889, March.
    2. Akbas, Beste & Kocaman, Ayse Selin & Nock, Destenie & Trotter, Philipp A., 2022. "Rural electrification: An overview of optimization methods," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 156(C).
    3. Karsu, Özlem & Kocaman, Ayse Selin, 2021. "Towards the Sustainable Development Goals: A Bi-objective framework for electricity access," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 216(C).

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