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Fuzzy MCDM for ranking the biofuels production pathways 319

(Chiclana et al., 1998), Weighted MaxMin and Weighted MinMax (Fodor
and Roubens, 1995), and Weighted Geometric (Chiclana et al., 2000) can
be used for the aggregation of fuzzy relations. On the other hand, Hwang
et al. (1992) proposed two other categories that are made up of the
approaches aiming to find a ranking, such as optimal degree, linguistic rank-
ing methods, and comparison functions (Mardani et al., 2015). Further
information can be found in the study of Mardani et al. (2015), who make
a comprehensive summary of the development and enrichment of theory
and applications for FMCDM from 1994 to 2014.
Due to the flexibility of FMCDM dealing with practical problems, it has
been widely applied in plenty of fields, especially engineering, including
civil engineering (Bago cius et al., 2014), computer science (Kaya and Kahra-
man, 2014; Yazdani-Chamzini, 2014), industrial engineering (Avikal et al.,
2014; Keskin, 2014), electrical engineering (Kurt, 2014), and mechanical
engineering (Azadnia et al., 2014; Mardani et al., 2015). Sadeghzadeh and
Salehi (2011) used TOPSIS to determine the optimal alternative from the
list of strategic technologies for fuel cell. Kucukvar et al. (2014) applied
F-ENROPY and TOPSIS to evaluate the performance of life cycle sustain-
ability for pavements. It is obvious to see the huge potential and application
value of FMCDM in solving engineering problems.
Based on the literature reviews, however, there is a research gap in the
current studies about multicriteria decision making on selecting the best or
the most sustainable biofuel production pathway: it is usually difficult or
even impossible for the users to obtain the data of the alternative biofuel pro-
duction pathways with respect to the evaluation criteria. In order to over-
come this research gap, this study aims at developing a fuzzy multicriteria
decision making approach for sustainability ranking of alternative pathways
for biofuel production.
Besides the introduction section, the remainder part of this chapter has
been organized as follows: the fuzzy multicriteria decision making method
for sustainability ranking of alternative pathways for biofuel production is
presented in Section 2; an illustrative case is studied in Section 3; sensitivity
analysis and validation are carried out in Section 4; and finally, this chapter is
concluded in Section 5.

2 Fuzzy multicriteria decision making method
Some frequently used MADM methods under fuzziness include fuzzy
analytic hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy TOPSIS, fuzzy outranking