Evaluating appropriate communication technology for smart grid by using a comprehensive decision-making approach fuzzy TOPSIS

The use of suitable communication technologies reduces power consumption, operational efficiency of the smart grid (SG), and collaboration between SG aspects from generation to the end-user. This paper aims to investigate an appropriate communication technology for SG. This is the first time to integrate communication technologies and use fuzzy Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) method to determine which communication technology is appropriate for the SG, in which Fuzzy logic approach can tackle vagueness and ambiguity in data and produce weights for all criteria and alternatives in the multi-criteria decision-making problem. The proposed method contains three stages: firstly, a comprehensive literature review and an expert's assessment are applied to identify relevant criteria for evaluating communication technologies. The evaluation criteria are cost, security, scalability, interference, reliability, flexibility, privacy, quick development, and wider spread access. Secondly, experts assign the weights for the appraisal criteria. Finally, the F-TOPSIS is implemented to find the appropriate alternative. The results in case study show that wireless communication technology is more appropriate and suitable for the SG. It expands the study of communication technologies and SGs from the perspectives of electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and environmental degradation, and may be helpful for the future SG communication technologies infrastructure.