A strategic decision support system for an electric utility company in a competitive environment

This paper describes a decision support system (DSS) based on an expert system (ES), which aids the user to select feasible projects among a strategic portfolio supplied by a dynamic simulator. The purpose of developing a DSS embedded in an ES structure, is to search for the modelling of the decision-maker rather than the decision process. Thus, the ES stores not only the expertise of the utility engineers, but some knowledge about the company goals. The dynamic simulator (DS) was developed by using the system dynamics paradigm, allowing the simulation of investment policies, taking into account the dynamic behavior of the involved variables and assuming that the decisions are taken continuously, leading to continuous actions. The proposed DSS is integrated with a strategic database (SDB), which contains information about competitors, regulatory system, special consumers and the energy wholesale market in general, forming an integrated computational system. The ES manages the integration between the DSS and the SDB, retrieving the information necessary to the simulation in progress.