Multi-Criteria Decision Aid for Sustainable Energy Prioritization Using Fuzzy Axiomatic Design

Abstract

Sustainability has gained tremendous importance and has been an important issue both for policy makers and practitioners. Realizing that the resources on the earth are limited, renewable energy alternatives have flourished and started to replace the conventional energy alternatives. Energy planning using different energy alternatives, for the long term becomes a vital decision. In this study, fuzzy multi criteria decision- making methodologies, axiomatic design (AD) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) are utilized for ranking both renewable and conventional energy alternatives. In the first phase AHP is utilized to determine the importance of the criteria and in the second phase fuzzy AD is used to evaluate the experts’ assessments. In the case study, both conventional and renewable energy alternatives are evaluated according to technical, economical, air quality and site selection perspectives. The case study results show that the renewable energy alternatives (biomass, geothermal power and wind) perform better than the conventional energy resources.