Supporting Multi-Attribute, Non-Compensating Selection of the Right Heat Pump Device for a Residential Building, Considering the Limited Availability of the Necessary Resources

Abstract

Reliable and comprehensive choice of a suitable domestic heat pump for a common dwelling house is discussed in the paper. The application of common and freely available market information about possible heat pump options is considered in this regard. The intangibility, imperfect nature, and overload of available information, as well as a common issue amongst interested homeowners—scarce critical resource availability, e.g., financial means—are also dealt with. A specific, universal multistage decision support procedure is proposed in the paper to help a houseowner to make an informed heat pump choice. At first, a concept of a pairwise comparison and a notion of dominance under imperfect information are utilized to build a kind of option hierarchy. A particular heat pump device is then recommended by means of exploring consecutive option hierarchy levels and an actual houseowner’s critical resource capacity in a non-commensurable manner. It seems that this joint application of common imperfect information about available options and critical resource availability, as well as the ideas of option dominance and non-commensurability, make the approach an interesting way for a casual homeowner to make an informed heat pump device choice. A sample analysis is also applied to show the merits and the usefulness of the approach in the paper.