Location mapping for constructing biomass power plant using multi-criteria decision-making method

Abstract

The use of renewable energy globally has shown to be one of the most promising strategies to move towards sustainable development. Biomass has become one of the world's most practical renewable energy sources. Decisions on bioenergy are difficult since the field crosses several Ministries' jurisdictions, including energy, agriculture, the environment, and industry and commerce. The biomass feedstocks are geographically and spatially distributed. Therefore, identifying and prioritizing suitable places for building expensive biomass plants is a complex problem for maximum productivity and return. This research provides an automated Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique with geographical information system (GIS) to solve the intricate nature of location identification and prioritization difficulty caused by the availability of numerous indicators, such as economic and environmental technical, social, and risk criteria. This research implements the Fuzzy-Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) method and compared the performance using standard TOPSIS, ELECTRE, and SAW methods. A standardization procedure has been applied to entail constructing an overall performance index to assess the outcomes. Eventually, the standard Pearson correlation coefficient is taken a gander at reciprocal connections amongst multi-criteria decision-making approaches. The F-TOPSIS outperforms the other methods with the highest performance ratio of 98.78%, fuel consumption ratio of 15.1%, sensitivity ratio of 92.8%, mean absolute error rate of 21.6%, mean square error rate of 23.1%, transportation cost of 25.8%, and decision-making ratio of 94.7% when compared to others. The comparative results indicate that a multi-criteria decision-making process is a valuable tool for finding suitable biomass locations.