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360 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

decision-making methods are mainly used for management, evaluation, and
prediction. For the application in management, it includes the water
resources management (Hernandez and Uddameri, 2010), sustainable
energy management (Boran et al., 2012), human resources management
(Zhang and Liu, 2011), and so on. For the application in evaluation, it
includes the supplier selection and evaluation (Boran et al., 2009), location
selection (Devi and Yadav, 2013), strategy selection (Liu et al., 2012), web
quality evaluation (Wang, 2009), network security evaluation (Li et al.,
2011), performance evaluation (Zhang, 2012), and so on. And for the appli-
cation in prediction, it includes air quality prediction (Yue et al., 2009), sen-
timent prediction (Wang et al., 2013), and so on.
Compared with a large number of theoretical studies, the applications of
IFS are still at the start-up stage. Most of the advance IFS decision-making
methods have not been applied in practice. More theoretical methods
should be studied in the application of real words. Researchers mainly apply
existing intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making methods to areas such as logis-
tics management and resource management. Applications in other practical
areas should also be explored.
In order to fill the gap of industrial application of IFS, this chapter aims at
developing a multicriteria intuitionistic fuzzy group decision-making
method for sustainability ranking of alternative bioethanol production path-
ways based on intuitionistic fuzzy theory. The intuitionistic fuzzy set is flex-
ible to manage the vagueness, and it enables the users to reduce the loss of the
original information and can effectively assure the credibility of the decision-
making results according to the opinions and preferences of the decision-
makers.

2Methods

The multicriteria group decision-making method for sustainability ranking
proposed in this chapter is based on the intuitionistic fuzzy set. For better
readability, the basic conception of the intuitionistic fuzzy set is first intro-
duced in Section 2.1. The detailed methodology of the multicriteria group
decision-making is then introduced in Section 2.2.

2.1 Basics of intuitionistic fuzzy set

Definition 1 Intuitionistic fuzzy set (Atanassov, 1986)
The intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) was developed by Atanassov (1986), and
the definition of IFS is presented in Eq. (13.1)