Selecting stratospheric airship energy storage system using analytic hierarchy process and physical programming

An evaluation model for stratospheric airship energy storage system selection is developed, which provides a new method for quantitative selection of renewable energy storage system. Firstly, some basic properties and their indexes are proposed to evaluate the overall performance of stratospheric airship energy storage system by qualitative analysis of airship’s operation principium and operation environment. Secondly, the weights to be used as subperformance indexes coefficients of the model are obtained with analytic hierarchy process method. The normalization of the subperformance indexes is implemented by physical programming method which takes the decision maker's preferable degree into account and can convert the indexes with different physical meaning and magnitude into nondimensionless satisfaction level evaluation scores with the magnitude in the same quantity level. Thirdly, the weights and evaluation scores of candidate designs’ indexes are combined with the aggregate objective function in the form of specific scores and the optimal energy storage system concept can be found out. Finally, an example of stratospheric airship energy storage system selection is given to illustrate this method. Moreover, the method presented in this paper can be effectively applied to various decision-making scenarios.