A framework for evaluating sustainable renewable energy sources under uncertain conditions: A case study

Abstract

The need for energy sources in India has increased abnormally in recent years due to industrial and societal growth. To meet this demand, it was a necessary choice of renewable energy sources (RESs) as a solution to lack of nonrenewable energy sources. Due to the multiplicity of involved factors, selecting the most appropriate RESs is a multiattribute decision making (MADM) problem. There is a large number of work associated with the development of MADM techniques, especially under ambiguous and uncertain conditions. However, the effective embedding of uncertainty and ambiguity and in decision-making remains a difficult challenge, and thus this study introduces a new framework for solving the problem of selecting the most suitable RESs which is based on the neutrosophic set and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multicriteria decision-making) method. It also reduces human intervention by being systematically applied. First, it transforms the linguistic terms presented into neutrosophic values and implements systematic techniques to compute missing values in the decision matrix using the case-based technique. Second, it calculates the weight of every linguistic variable as well as those of the decision-makers (DMs) and weighted attributes. Furthermore, it creates an aggregated single valued neutrosophic decision matrix for DMs. Finally, it calculates the overall dominance-degree matrix, derives the overall values, and ranks the alternatives. It is applied to select RESs in Karnataka, India, and the obtained results show that wind energy is the most suitable RES for India, with small hydroenergy second most appropriate.