Multi-criteria Group Decision Support with Linguistic Variables in Long-term Scenarios for Belgian Energy Policy

Da Ruan (Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, Belgium)

Jie Lu (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia)

Erik Laes (Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Belgium)

Guangquan Zhang (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia)

Jun Ma (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia)

Gaston Meskens (Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, Belgium)

Abstract: Real world decisions often made in the presence of multiple, conflicting, and incommensurate criteria. Decision making requires multiple perspectives of different individuals as more decisions are made now in groups than ever before. This is particularly true when the decision environment becomes more complex such as sustainability policies study in environmental and energy sectors. Group decision making processes judgments or solutions for decision problems based on the input and feedback of multiple individuals. Multi-criteria decision and evaluation problems at tactical and strategic levels in practice involve fuzziness in terms of linguistic variables vis-à-vis criteria, weights, and decision maker judgments. Relevant alternatives or scenarios are evaluated according to a number of desired criteria. A fuzzy multi-criteria group decision software tool is developed to analyze long-term scenarios for Belgian energy policy in this paper.

Keywords: Fuzzy numbers, energy policy, evaluation model, group decision support, linguistic variables, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)

Categories: F.4.3, H.5.3, J.5, M.4