Influencing factor analysis and enterprise evaluation of lithium-ion battery recycling based on improved DEMATEL method

Abstract

Spent lithium-ion battery (LIB) recycling can create great pollution to the environment. Understanding the safety, environment, technique, and regulation factors’ impact on the recycling process is crucial. Due to the complexity of the relevant factors, and there is a certain degree of correlation and dependence between the factors, the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is used to analyze the factors’ degree of impact in this study. As the experts are ambiguous about some relations between the factors, it is impossible to conduct integrated evaluation. The improved DEMATEL method is proposed in this study to make up the missing relations. Further, the weights of the factors will be calculated. In the improved DEMATEL method, the numerical scale of a linguistic term set is introduced. Therefore, the numerical scale used by experts can not only be uniform and symmetrical, but can also be non-uniform symmetric, non-uniform asymmetric, etc. Finally, both reusing and recycling companies are included in this study and their factors’ importance weights were analyzed with the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method.