Resumen de A contribution to multi-criteria decision making in sustainable energy management based on fuzzy and qualitative reasoning
Arayeh Afsordegan
Energy problems are serious problems caused by limited resources and by human activity such as deforestation, water pollution and various other long-term practices that have environmental impact which produces global warming and climate change. These complex problems usually involve multiple conflicting criteria and multiple decision makers. They require the use of multi-criteria decision-making methods to evaluate different types of variables with respect to sustainability factors addressing conflicting economic, technological, social and environmental aspects. These factors, especially social ones, are not always precise, as imprecision and uncertainty are features of the real world. Therefore, in order to provide useful data from experts' assessments, in this thesis a new multi-criteria decision-making method, as a useful tool in energy planning, is presented. This method supports decision makers in all stages of the decision-making process with uncertain values. An exhaustive literature review on multi-criteria decision analysis and energy planning has been conducted in this thesis. First, the in-depth study of criteria and indicators in the energy planning area is presented. Some well-known multi-criteria decision-making methods and their applications are introduced. In these problems, it is often difficult to obtain exact numerical values for some criteria and indicators. In order to overcome this shortcoming, qualitative reasoning techniques integrated with multi-criteria decision-making methods are capable of representing uncertainty, emulating skilled humans, and handling vague situations. This study proposes a Qualitative TOPSIS (Q-TOPSIS) method, which is a new method for ranking multi-criteria alternatives in group decision making. This new method, in its first step, takes into account qualitative data provided by the decision makers' individual linguistic judgments on the performance of alternatives with respect to each criterion, without any previous aggregation or normalization. Then, in its second step, it incorporates the judgments of decision makers into the modified TOPSIS method to generate a complete ranking of alternatives. Three applications of the proposed method in energy planning are presented. In the first case, the application of the Q-TOPSIS method in a case study of renewable energy alternatives selection is presented. These alternatives are ranked and the proposed method is compared with the modified fuzzy TOPSIS method. A simulation of thirty scenarios using different weights demonstrates that the simplicity and interpretability of Q-TOPSIS provides a general improvement over classic TOPSIS in the case of ordinal assessments. Second, a real case study in a social framework to find an appropriate place for wind farm location in Catalonia is presented. In this case different alternatives were proposed based on social actors' preferences for the location of the desired wind farms in a region between the counties of Urgell and Conca de Barbera. Ranking alternatives concludes that an alternative combining two different initial projects is the best option. Using the proposed method to handle a high degree of conflict in group decision making involving multi-dimensional concepts simplified the experts' measurements. Finally, an application to energy efficiency in buildings using the SEMANCO (Semantic tools for carbon reduction in urban planning) platform is presented in order to assess the energy performance and CO2 emissions of projected urban plans at the city level in Manresa. In this case study, an application of Q-TOPSIS helps decision makers to rank different projects with respect to multi-granular quantitative and qualitative criteria and offers outputs which are very easy for decision makers to understand.
