Multi-criteria optimal planning for energy policies in CLP?

The number of issues, stakeholders needs and regulations that a policy must consider in the current world is so high that addressing them only with common-sense is unthinkable. Policy makers have to consider disparate issues, as diverse as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy. A single person cannot be expert in all these subjects. Thus, to obtain a well assessed policy in the current complex world one can adopt decision support systems featuring optimization components. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare them. Each plan is environmentally assessed and its environmental footprint is provided in terms of emissions, global warming effect, human toxicity, and acidification. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces. An intuitive graphic user interface has been added to provide easy access to the web service and the CLP application.