At present

single coal combustion in coal-fired power plants has been gradually replaced by blended coal combustion

so comprehensive evaluation of blending schemes is very crucial for decision-making in fuel procurement and management. In this paper

a comprehensive evaluation method for coal blending schemes was proposed

which was based on principal component analysis(PCA) method and improved technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution(TOPSIS) method. In this method

the PCA is firstly used to reduce the dimension of evaluation indexes and determine the weight according to the contribution rate of each principal component

thus the problems of information duplication between indexes and weight selection for each index can be solved. Then

on the basis of the conventional TOPSIS method

the concept of absolute positive and negative ideal solution is introduced

which avoids the possible reverse sequence phenomenon caused by the conventional TOPSIS evaluation method. This method was adopted to carry out a comprehensive evaluation for six coal blending schemes in a coal-fired power plant

and the evaluation result was proved to be the best scheme by rational analysis and reverse order test. The results show that

the coal blending scheme selected by this method meets the requirements of economy and stability and has the characteristics of anti-reverse order.