Construction And Application Of Sustainability Assessment And Decision-Making Support Framework Of Chemical Industrial Systems Based On Interval Choquet Integral Preference Model

The chemical industry is vital to maintain a modern way of life and well-beings of human,however,its rapid development also brings serious environmental and social problems.Therefore,the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development have been continuously infiltrated to the development of the chemical industry in recent decades,and the sustainability assessment and decision-making methods of chemical industrial systems are widely studied based on the idea of“only what gets measured gets managed”.In a typical sustainability assessment and decision-making model,the multiple sustainability criteria in economic,environmental,social,and technological dimensions are comprehensively considered.Then,the sustainability performance on the criteria of each alternative can be obtained using the various qualitative or quantitative methods.At last,the multi-criteria decision-making（MCDM）methods can be used to perform the weighting and aggregating operation.However,few practical applications of sustainability assessment and decision-making models can be found compared to the rich theoretical research.One of the reasons is that the most commonly used MCDM methods,i.e.,the Multi-Attribute Utility/Value Theory（MAU/VT）or the outranking methods,are based on the assumption of mutual preference independence among criteria,which will result the errors evaluation or the suboptimal solutions because of the inability to handle interactions among criteria.Thus,this paper aims to establish a sustainability assessment and decision-making support framework based on the Choquet integral preference model,which can deal with the interaction among criteria and universally apply to chemical systems.In view of the characteristics of chemical industrial systems with inherent uncertainties and many criteria,a novel interval Choquet integral preference model,i.e.,the Shapley-Interval-Choquet（SIC）integral preference model,was constructed using the Shapley index expression in this paper.The formula of interval fuzzy measures using the Shapley index expression,and SIC integral expression based on the above fuzzy measures were defined along with the relevant theoretical proofs.While,in the subsequent process of fuzzy measure identification,the ratios of the fuzzy measures between individual criterion were simplified to that of the additive measures.Then,the ratios of the fuzzy measures between individual criterion and the direction of interaction between criteria were used as the initial preference to construct the feasible region of the interval fuzzy measures.Finally,the most desired interval fuzzy measures were selected in the feasible region by the compromise principle which is an additional selection principle.The model proposed in this paper can not only deal with the abundant interactions and uncertainties among the criteria,but also greatly alleviate the cognitive difficulties of the decision makers.Furthermore,the model has great advantages in handling the complex hierarchy of criteria and controlling the consistency of decision makers’judgments,which is more suitable for the sustainability assessment and decision-making of chemical industrial systems.Meanwhile,the following four improvements had been further made in the newly developed framework:1).Establishing the SIC-GRA integral preference model by combining the SIC preference model with grey relational analysis（GRA）method in order to integrate the advantages of other MCDM methods.2).Proposing a novel selection principle for the importance of the additional selection principle,i.e.,the consensus reaching principle,which can obtain a more representative solution because of the consideration of more feasible solutions.3).Establishing the interval best worst method（BWM）by extending the deterministic BWM to the interval uncertainty environment for dealing with the cognitive uncertainty of human judgments in the process of quantification of qualitative criteria.4).Proposing a method integrating the BWM and linear interpolation for integrating the relevant preferences of decision makers in the construction process of a common scale.Subsequently,the decision-making support framework was applied to determine the sustainability priorities of five different CO₂ utilization technologies（CO₂thermochemical conversion to formic acid,methane,methanol,dimethyl carbonate and urea）.In which,12 sub-criteria in economic,environmental,social and technological sustainability dimensions were selected as the attributes of sustainability assessment.And the above five conversion pathways were simulated by Aspen Plus（V12.0）with the same CO₂ feed rate to obtain the quantitative data.Subsequently,four sustainability decision-making models based on the above two preference models and two selection principles were used to obtain the comprehensive sustainability of five CO₂ conversion pathways,along with the comparison between different decision-making models and the sensitivity analysis of the related parameters.The following conclusions are drawn:1).Methanol pathway has the highest sustainability.2).The above different sustainability assessment frameworks are all valid.（3）.It is necessary to consider criterion interaction in sustainability assessment and decision-making of chemical industrial systems.（4）.The proposed models have strong robustness,and the SIC-GRA integral preference model are more robust than the SIC integral preference model.Finally,in view of the excellent sustainability performance of the methanol pathway,the sustainability of five methanol production methods was evaluated and analyzed to facilitate the development of methanol economy in China.And a reverse sensitivity analysis of weights was executed to identify the key attributes and provide the recommend policies.