Page 290 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

288 13. Multi-criteria decision-making after life cycle sustainability assessment under hybrid information

13.5 Conclusions

Life cycle sustainability assessment can be used to determine the economic sustainability,
environmental sustainability, and social sustainability of different energy and industrial sys-
tems. However, it is still difficult for the decision-makers to determine the most sustainable
alternative after life cycle sustainability assessment. This study aims to develop a novel multi-
criteria decision analysis method for achieving life cycle sustainability ranking of energy and
industrial systems under hybrid information, because there are usually multiple types of data
after life cycle sustainability assessment. All in all, the developed method in this study has the
following advantages:
(1) Linguistic variables corresponding to intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are used to accurately
describe the alternative energy and industrial systems with respect to the “soft” criteria,
which cannot be quantified directly.
(2) Uncertainties can be addressed by using the interval numbers, and decision-making is
achieved under uncertainties.
(3) The ambiguity and hesitations existing in the decision-makers’ judgments can be solved
by using the interval best-worst method.
(4) The developed method can help the decision-makers to select the most sustainable energy
and industrial system among different alternatives using hybrid information.
However, the weighting method used cannot incorporate the preferences and opinions of
different decision-makers simultaneously; thus, the weights can only reflect the willingness
of a specific group of stakeholders. Meanwhile, all the criteria for sustainability assessment
were assumed to be independent; thus, the interdependences among these criteria were not
considered in the decision-making. Therefore, the future work of the authors is to develop a
multi-criteria decision analysis method that can solve the above-mentioned two problems for
life cycle sustainability ranking of energy and industrial systems.

Acknowledgment
This study was financially supported by The Start-up Grant of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University for New Em-
ployees (Project title: Multi-criteria Decision Making for More Sustainable Transportation, project account code: 1-ZE8W).

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