Prioritizing Strategic Innovative Energy Technologies for Development by a Novel Fuzzy Approach Based on Distances from Ideals (Case Study: Upstream Technologies of Iran's Oil Industry Fields)

Abstract

Previous empirical research about the functions of innovative systems has been less enabled to present practical strategies for managers' decisions. The main purpose of this paper is to prioritize strategic innovative upstream technologies in the oil industry for policy-making and commercializing within the framework of energy technological innovation systems. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy approach based on distance from ideals to scrutinize the effects of effective criteria on the policy-making process and rank new and essential technologies in various fields of the oil industry namely materials, services, and equipment. The developed fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to select the best strategic innovation technology. Due to the importance of selecting the best technology, several decision-makers (DMs) who are experts in their areas of expertise are applied. In order to increase the accuracy of the results, a new subjective and objective approach is introduced to calculate the weight of DMs' opinions. One of the advantages of this approach is considering both DMs’ resume and opinions in the decision-making process. It should be noted that due to the management of real-world uncertainty as well as increasing the accuracy of results in applying DMs’ opinions in computations, trapezoidal fuzzy sets are used in all stages of computation. A case study about upstream technologies of Iran’s oil industry is introduced and solved by the presented method. To demonstrate the accuracy of the results and review the advantages of the presented approach, a comparative analysis with a recent literature study is performed.