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Fuzzy MCDM for ranking the biofuels production pathways 333

5 Conclusion

A fuzzy multicriteria decision making method was developed for sustainabil-
ity ranking of biofuel production pathways, and the stakeholders/
decision-makers are allowed to use linguistic variables to weigh the relative
importance of the criteria for sustainability assessment and rate the alternative
biofuel production pathways, and the opinions and preferences of
the stakeholders/decision-makers can be effectively expressed by using fuzzy
numbers. However, there are also some weak points in this study:
(1) Some useful information and data cannot be effectively used, because
the relative performances of the alternative biofuel production path-
ways with respect to the evaluation were merely determined according
to the judgments of the stakeholders/decision-makers;
(2) The relative importance of the evaluation criteria was assigned by the
stakeholders/decision-makers directly rather than in a comparison way,
thus, this may lead to some inaccurate judgments.
The future work of the authors is to develop a multicriteria decision making
method which can overcome the abovementioned two weak points for sus-
tainability ranking of biofuel production pathways.

Acknowledgments

This method used in this study was based on Ren, J., Fedele, A., Mason, M., Manzardo, A.,
Scipioni, A., 2013. Fuzzy multi-actor multi-criteria decision making for sustainability assess-
ment of biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production. Int. J. Hydrog. Energy 38,
9111–9120.

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