Assessment of uncertain alternatives for co-located aquaculture and offshore wind farm in Tasmania

This study investigated a set of 36 alternatives of co-located aquaculture and an offshore wind farm in three potential sites across Tasmania. We assessed the alternatives against technological aspects, environmental aspects, and site-selection factors through the development of a Bayesian network and an influence diagram such that the uncertainties of each possible vector of consequences were effectively assessed for each alternative. We structured the consequence space as a three-level hierarchical tree and constructed the multi-attribute utility function under various independence conditions. We described in detail the assessment of the scaling constants in the multi-attribute utility function. The analysed alternatives were ranked based on the maximum expected utility rule to outline the best one. We performed one-dimensional and multi-dimensional sensitivity analyses, to test how the solution is impacted by the subjectively assessed five-dimensional utility function and showed that the constructed function is rather robust within a very wide range of values. Finally, we outlined some future aspects of development and implementation for the Bayesian-network-influence diagram based multi-attribute analysis as a decision-support system tool for offshore Blue Growth projects with different types of production systems.