Page 382 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

338 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

development of biofuel industry is still “in debate,” and people are usually
puzzled with two questions: (i) Is biofuel really sustainable? (ii) Which is the
most sustainable pathway for biofuel production?
As for the question: is biofuel really sustainable? There are many studies
for answering this question. The most typical is to use life cycle tools to ana-
lyze the sustainability of biofuel production pathways from cradle to grave.
For instance, Ou et al. (2009) employed life cycle assessment (LCA) to inves-
tigate the energy consumption and GHG emissions of six biofuel pathways
in China. Yang et al. (2011) used life cycle thinking to analyze the water
footprint and nutrients balance of biodiesel from microalgae. Requena
et al. (2011) employed LCA to study the environmental impacts of biofuels
from sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, and soybean oil. However, all these studies
can only answer the first question. As for the second question: which is the
most sustainable pathway for biofuel production? It is usually different and
even the stakeholders/decision-makers know the performances of different
biofuel production pathways and there are two main reasons: (i) there are
usually various conflict criteria for sustainability assessment of biofuel pro-
duction pathways; (ii) there are various data uncertainties, and the data of
the alternative biofuel production pathways with respect to the evaluation
criteria usually varies. Therefore this study aims at developing an interval
multicriteria decision making (MCDM) method for sustainability prioritiza-
tion of biofuel production pathways under uncertainties.
MCDM is a widely used decision-making tool that allows for scientific
and comprehensive analysis based on multiple data and decision-maker’s
preferences (Triantaphyllou, 2000). MCDM methods commonly used
include Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (Saaty, 1980), Technique for
Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) (Hwang
and Yoon, 1981), Gray Relational Analysis (GRA) (Deng, 1989), The Pref-
erence Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations
(PROMETHEE) (Brans et al., 1986), and Elimination and Choice Expres-
sing Reality (ELECTRE) (Benayoun et al., 1966). The decision-making
method based on uncertain data is an extension of MCDM, which is used
to analyze the ranking, selection, and classification of more than one eval-
uation criterion with uncertain or fuzzy information in the data (Ho et al.,
2010). Due to the uncertainty of subjective judgment, the normal fluctua-
tion caused by environmental factors, and the uncertainty caused by knowl-
edge limitations, the application of MCDM under uncertainties plays a
significant role in strategy establishment (Ren and Toniolo, 2018). MCDM
dealing with uncertain data can be classified into interval MCDM, fuzzy