Selecting sustainable renewable energy-powered desalination: an MCDM framework under uncertain and incomplete information

Huang Qiongjian

摘要

Renewable energy (RE)-powered desalination technology benefits both the water supply and energy utilization. Therefore, it is critical to propose a decision-making tool to identify the best technology by incorporating multi-criteria from the environmental, economic, social, and technological aspects. However, considering multiple criteria usually comes at costs. On the one hand, the lack of enough data regarding the multi-criteria decreases the reliability of the decision-making; on the other hand, the uncertain data that arise from the complex nature of the RE-powered desalination technologies limit the accuracy of the decision-making. With this in mind, this work aims to develop a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework to select sustainable technology of the RE-powered desalination under uncertain and incomplete information by combining adjacent comparative programming, the interval entropy, and interval VIKOR (vlsekriterijuska optimizacija i komoromisno resenje). Compared to the existing works, the proposed framework has the following contributions and advantages: It introduces adjacent comparative programming, which can address the data patching issue by resorting to the linguistic-based comparisons among incomplete information and known data; it adopts interval entropy for assigning the weights and interval VIKOR for ranking the technologies, which not only handle the uncertain condition by incorporating the interval number, but also provide easy yet reliable decision-making tools that can fully utilize the numerical data. The feasibility of the framework was confirmed by studying an illustrative case, which investigated nine configurations between different desalination technologies (multistage flash, humidification and dehumidification, multi-effect distillation, reverse osmosis, electrodialysis, and mechanical vapor compression) and renewable energy resources (solar thermal, geothermal, solar photovoltaic, wind energy, and hybrid photovoltaic and wind). Besides, this work conducted the sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis regarding the results of the case study. It also offered corresponding theoretical implications and management inspirations. In general, the proposed framework could make methodological contributions to the decision-making issues regarding RE-powered desalination under uncertain and incomplete information. The obtained result also can serve as an early reference in integrating renewable energy resources and desalination technologies.

Selecting sustainable renewable energy-powered desalination: an MCDM framework under uncertain and incomplete information

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