Site selection of crop straw cogeneration project under intuitionistic fuzzy environment: A four-stage decision framework from the perspective of circular economy

Abstract

Due to the energy shortage and environmental pollution, the development and utilization of biomass energy has aroused increasing attention all over the world. The crop straw cogeneration (CSC) of heat and power is an efficient renewable energy utilization technology in rural area, which is a practical solution to energy saving and pollution control. Circular economy, characterized by resource conservation, recycling and environment harmony, greatly enriches the connotation of energy projects, which is of guidance implications for the development of CSC. In this paper, the CSC project site selection is conducted under the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework from the perspective of circular economy. A complete criteria system considering the sustainability indicators is established to reflect the characteristics of CSC projects for the first time. Furthermore, due to the complexity and the lack of ready-made experience in the CSC site selection, the intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) are improved and applied by creating a novel IFSs distance formula to provide clear expression for the hesitation degrees of the experts. Finally, taking Changchun City, Jilin Province as an example, the improved TOmada de Decisao Interativa Multicriterio (TODIM) method is applied to obtain the optimal location. A2 (Nongan) is the best choice among the four given alternatives, and comparative analysis shows that the improved TODIM method is better than the other methods. This study improves the application of intuitionistic fuzzy sets in site selection of energy projects and brings new insight for the decision-making from the perspective from circular economy.