A Novel CRITIC-RS-VIKOR Group Method with Intuitionistic Fuzzy Information for Renewable Energy Sources Assessment

This study aims to propose a new group multi-attribute decision-analysis (MADA) model to prioritize the renewable energy sources (RESs) from sustainability perspectives. The selection of RESs can be considered as a MADA problem due to considering the numerous conflicting sustainability indicators/factors. In this regard, we propose an integrated decision-making framework with the "criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation (CRITIC)", the "rank sum (RS)" and the "Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR)" approaches with intuitionistic fuzzy information called the "IF-CRITIC-RS-VIKOR" model. In the developed model, the CRITIC is applied to derive the objective weights, while the RS model is used to compute the subjective weights of the considered sustainability indicators. Further, an incorporated weight-determining formula is presented by combining the CRITIC and RS models under intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Moreover, the VIKOR method is employed to rank the candidate RESs by means of several sustainability indicators. In this line, new intuitionistic fuzzy distance measures are proposed to calculate the "group utility (GU)" and "individual regret (IR)" degrees of candidate RESs. Based on the obtained results, the most significant factors for RESs assessment are impact on ecosystem, technology cost and efficiency, respectively. The assessment outcomes show that the wind energy can serve as an effective RES followed by the solar energy, biomass energy and small hydel energy. Furthermore, comparative study and sensitivity analysis are discussed to show the utility and reasonability of the proposed method.