A MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION FOR CAPITAL STRUCTURE IN PRIVATELY-FINANCED INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS

Private financing is playing an increasing role in public infrastructure construction projects worldwide. However, private investors/operators are exposed to the financial risk of low profitability due to the inaccurate estimation of facility demand, operation income, maintenance costs, etc. From the operator's perspective, a sound and thorough financial feasibility study is required to establish the appropriate capital structure of a project. Operators tend to reduce the equity amount to minimize the level of risk exposure, while creditors persist to raise it, in an attempt to secure a sufficient level of financial involvement from the operators. Therefore, it is important for creditors and operators to reach an agreement for a balanced capital structure that synthetically considers both profitability and repayment capacity. This paper presents an optimal capital structure model for successful private infrastructure investment. This model finds the optimized point where the profitability is balanced with the repayment capacity, with the use of the concept of utility function and multi-objective GA (Generic Algorithm)-based optimization. A case study is presented to show the validity of the model and its verification. The research conclusions provide a proper capital structure for privately-financed infrastructure projects through a proposed multi-objective model.