Evaluation of power plants to prioritise the investment projects using fuzzy PROMETHEE method

ABSTRACT

Increasing population growth of Iran, and consequently, increasing the annual energy consumption has made the construction of more than 3000 MW power plant necessary. Taking into account various criteria, some power plants have been evaluated and ranked to select the most appropriate power plant for investment. For this purpose, three aspects and seven main criteria for evaluating power plants have been determined. Afterward, weights of sub-criteria have been determined by Analytical Network Process method, and eventually, power plants have been ranked by a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method (i.e. fuzzy PROMETHEE II). Moreover, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis has been carried. Finally, power plants have been ranked by fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method once again. Since the value of Spearman Correlation Test for two implemented methods is equal to 0.98, it can be concluded that fuzzy PROMETHEE II performs as well as fuzzy TOPSIS in ranking alternatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Multi-criteria decision-making
• fuzzy PROMETHEE II
• fuzzy TOPSIS
• analytical network process

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Tavanir Company, Tehran, for providing data to support this paper. The authors also thank the valuable comments of reviewers which guided them to enhance this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.