Fuzzy Ensemble of Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods for Heating Energy Transition in Danish Households

Abstract

More than 110 countries, including 500 cities worldwide, have set the goal of reaching carbon neutrality. Heating contributes to most of the residential energy consumption and carbon emissions. The green energy transition of fossil-based heating systems is needed to reach the emission goals. However, heating systems vary in energy source, heating technology, equipment location, and these complexities make it challenging for households to compare heating systems and make decisions. Hence, a decision support tool that provides a generalized ranking of individual heating alternatives is proposed for households as decision makers to identify the optimal choice. This paper presents an analysis of 13 heating alternatives and 19 quantitative criteria in technological, environmental, and financial aspects, combines ideal solution-based multi-criteria decision making with 6 weighting methods and 4 normalization methods, and introduces ensemble learning with a fuzzy membership function derived from Cauchy distribution to finalize the ultimate ranking. The robustness of the proposed method is verified by three sensitive analyses from different aspects. Air-to-water heat pump, solar heating and direct district heating are the top three rankings in the final result under Danish national average data. A framework is designed to guide decision makers to apply this ranking guideline with their practical, feasible situations.