Page 402 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

358 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

Stichnothe (2011) reviewed several sustainability categories of biofuels and
show how to determine the life cycle economic sustainability and environ-
mental impacts of biofuels. All these methods can effectively be used for sus-
tainability assessment of biofuel production pathways, but there are several
problems needing to be resolved in future:
(1) It is difficult to collect some data of biofuel production pathways with
respect to the criteria for sustainability assessment.
(2) The ambiguity and hesitations existing in human judgments cannot be
addressed in these methods.
(3) The selection of the most sustainable biofuel production pathway usu-
ally involves multiple groups of different decision-makers/stakeholders
with different preferences and opinions.
To address the earlier issues, group multicriteria decision-making method is
introduced in this chapter.
With the increasing complexity and uncertainty of objectives and fast
growth of the knowledge and information, it is difficult for a single
decision-maker to effectively resolve the problems due to the limited
knowledge and experience. It is needed to gather multiple decision-makers
with different knowledge structures and experience to conduct a group
decision-making (Kilgour and Eden, 2010). Thus group decision-making
can be regarded as the process in which multiple decision-makers participate
in decision-making analysis, gather individual judgments into group judg-
ments, and then make decisions according to the group information. The
concept of group decision-making was first proposed by Black in 1958.
He divided group decision-making into two categories according to the
decision-makers’ code of conduct: collective decision-making and game
problem (Black, 1958). Moving from single decision-maker to a multiple
decision-maker setting introduces a great deal of complexity into the anal-
ysis. Hwang and Lin (1987) further defined the group decision-making into
the analysis which is extended to account for the conflicts among different
interests groups who have different objective, goals, and so forth. The pref-
erence of group members to give alternatives, and then based on a certain
rule to become a group compromise or a consistent preference order.
Group multicriteria decision-making is created when different evalua-
tion criteria are involved in group decision-making. Decision-makers judge
each alternative based on different criteria and their own preferences. The
individual preferences are aggregated into group preferences in order to
evaluate, sort, and select the alternatives. Group multicriteria decision-
making involves three basic processes (Safarzadeh et al., 2018): (1)