Using an Entropy-GRA, TOPSIS, and PCA Method to Evaluate the Competitiveness of AFVs – The China Case

Feng Xue,Qian Huang,Bharat Pathak,Chuanlei He

doi:10.7307/ptt.v32i5.3417

Abstract

With the increase in severe environmental problems associated with fossil fuel vehicles, the development of Alternative Fuel Vehicles (AFVs) has led to their promotion and use in Chinese provinces and cities. The comprehensive evaluation of competitiveness of the AFV industry in Chinese cities is beneficial to analyse the effects and relationships of different factors to promote the sustainable development of the AFV industry and guide the growth paths of the cities. An industrial competitiveness evaluation index system is established based on the characteristics of AFVs, and the development of the AFV industry in ten typical cities in China is comprehensively evaluated based on the Grey Relative Analysis (GRA) Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methods. To evaluate the results, the entropy weighting method is used for the weight distribution, and the industrial competitiveness rankings of ten cities are obtained by the entropy-GRA, TOPSIS, PCA (EGTP) method. The results show that Beijing is ranked first, followed by Shanghai, and Qingdao is ranked last. By analysing the correlation between the evaluation methods and indicators, it is found that EGTP has a high correlation with the other three evaluation methods, which proves the rationality of the weighted linear combination of GRA and the other three methods. Indices C5 (pure electric car proportion) and C13 (average concentration of PM2.5) were outliers due to the small number of samples.

Highlights

With socio-economic development and increases in consumer material consumption, the global car ownership is increasing, and the resulting environmental problems have attracted worldwide attention
The aim of this paper is to establish a competitiveness evaluation system of the Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) industry based on relevant guidance documents and use the improved Grey Relative Analysis (GRA), TOPSIS and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) methods - EGTP - to comprehensively evaluate the competitiveness of the Chinese urban AFV industry, which can reveal the overall development level of a country at the micro-level and provide policy enlightenment and rules for the development of AFVs in the future
This paper proposes an evaluation method for the industrial competitiveness of urban AFVs based on the entropy-GRA, TOPSIS, and PCA methods

Summary

Introduction

With socio-economic development and increases in consumer material consumption, the global car ownership is increasing, and the resulting environmental problems have attracted worldwide attention. Clean-energy vehicles must be promoted to reduce these environmental problems. Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) have attracted extensive attention since their emergence, due to their reliability, environmental friendliness and pollution-free characteristics. In China, a survey found that 42% of air pollution comes from the transportation sector, and only 99 of China's 338 cities at or above the prefectural level meet the environmental air quality standards [2]. Because exhaust emissions from traditional automobiles are the primary source of these pollutants, clean AFVs are able to mitigate these environmental problems.

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Conclusion