Towards the sustainable development goals: A bi-objective framework for electricity access

Traditionally, the main focus of evaluation in universal electricity access problems has been cost. However, additional criteria such as increasing renewable penetration due to environmental concerns or grid penetration due to reliability concerns, have become increasingly important. We acknowledge the importance of additional criteria and propose a bi-objective framework so as to help decision makers investigate the trade-offs between potentially conflicting criteria in rural electrification. We consider two objective space based exact approaches using the Prize Collecting Steiner Tree (PCST) formulation and two metaheuristic algorithms to find Pareto solutions, and investigate their performances on real life problem instances. This study is expected to be an important decision support tool for the electrification of underdeveloped communities, having the potential of contributing to their socio-economic development.