An Intelligent Decision Support System for Residential Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy Utilization in Rural China

On the basis of investigation on residential energy consumption and renewable energy status quo in more than 300 rural areas of China's 31 provinces and cities, a database is built, and a corresponding intelligent decision support system (IDSS) based on SoftMan (Zeng and Tu, 2003) is put forward. First, the architecture of IDSS based on SoftMan is analyzed. Second, the three-level decision-making indexes are established, then nondimensional indicators of treatment is done by a multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model, and the weight coefficients are determined by the grey relational analysis. Third, the authors coordinate the decision-making process based on SoftMan and their implementations are given. The system can predict the future trends in energy consumption and the possibility of renewable energy alternatives to conventional energy by statistical analysis and evaluation on the results, and a reasonable energy plan for the government can be generated. It can offer valuable lessons for the pursuit of a sustainable rural development strategy.