A decision support framework for new energy selection in rural areas from the perspectives of information reliability and criterion non-compensation

Abstract

New energy selection in rural areas plays a vital role in the development and utilization of rural new energy, which is of great significance for achieving the national goal of energy conservation and emission reduction. The purpose of this paper is to construct a decision support framework to manage the problem of new energy selection in rural areas from the perspectives of information reliability and criterion non-compensation. The Z-number is introduced to depict new energy evaluation information and identify information reliability. Meanwhile, some outranking relations are established, and some outranking aggregation and exploitation procedures are presented to handle the non-compensation among new energy evaluation criteria. To testify the applicability and validity of the constructed framework, two empirical cases of new energy selection in the rural areas of Liangping District and Rudong County are studied, and some discussions and analyses are conducted. The study shows that biomass energy and wind energy are appropriate new energy resources for development and utilization in the two regions. Moreover, the discussion results show that the constructed framework can ensure the precision of decision results, and the analysis results demonstrate that it outperforms other existing methods and can handle existing defects effectively.