| As the world's largest consumer of the traditional energy as well as biggest producer of the new energy,China has been relied heavily on the energy-chemical industry for supporting its economic and social development.However,the energy-chemical industry is deemed as a system with great investment and high energy consumption,and could cause severe environmental and social problems.Therefore,it is essential to incorporate the concept of sustainability into this industry for achieving its healthful development.As for the decision-making issues regarding the energy-chemical industry,there are two critical concerns should be addressed,including the sustainability assessment of alternative systems,and the sustainability optimization of an exiting system.However,the following concerns have not been investigated sufficiently in the previous researches,i.e.weighting the criteria regarding the attributes(in the sustainability assessment)and the objectives(in the sustainability optimization),developing the models of the multi-attribute decision-making and the multi-objective optimization,and handling with the uncertainties of the objective data regarding the investigated system and the subjective judgments from the involved decision-makers.Therefore,by aggregating and/or improving the previous models,this research aims to develop a generic sustainability assessment methdology to prioritize alternative energy-chemical systems as well as a systematic sustainability optimization methdology for retrofitting an existing system.In which,the objective properties regarding the investgated system and the subjective preferences of the decision-makers can be fully utilized to generate rigorous decisions by intergrating both the absolute sustainability performance and relative sustainability balance of the energy-chemical system under uncertainties.The proposed methdologies could offer innovative solutions for promoting the sustainable development of the energy-chemical industry.The proposed sustainability assessment framework consists of the following four steps,i.e.establishment of criteria system,collection of alternatives' performances,determination of criteria's weights,and prioritization of alternatives' sequence.A comprehensive evaluation system that consists of both hard and soft indicators from the environmental,economic,social-political,and technical concerns is first constructed in the framework,in which different types of uncertainties with respect to the hard and soft indicators can be properly addressed by using the interval parameter and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method,respectively.The fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory-based analytic network process method,and the interval entropy technique are adopted to determine the criteria's weight by combining the objective data and subjective opinions.Afterward,a novel vector-based algorithm was developed for rigorously prioritizing the alternative systems via the integration of both the absolute sustainability performance and relative sustainability balance of each alternative under uncertainties.The proposed framework was illustrated by a case study to prioritize the sustainability of five ammonia production systems,demonstrating that it is a generic decision-making platform for helping the stakeholders to identify the most sustainable energy-chemical alternatives.More importantly,by conducting the the sensitivity analysis,identifying the critical criteria,and comparing the weighting and ranking results derived by this methodology with those determined using other multi-criteria decision-making approaches,not noly the effectiveness of the proposed framework and the robustness of the assessment result can be comfirmed,but also the advantages with respect to determination of criteria's weights,prioritization of alternatives' sequence,and handling the uncertainties within the decision-making can be verified.The proposed sustainability optimization framework includes two stages,that is system definition and characterization,and model formulation and resolution.In the framework,the first stage should be conducted on a case-by-case basis regarding the investigated energy-chemical system,in which,the retrofit technologies relative to the case as well as the development objectives should be identified.While the second stage adopts a unique Pareto solution for the multi-objectiive optimization problem,which is characterized by not only comprehensively addressing the trade-offs among multi-objective via the aggregation of both decision-makers' preferences and system's properties,but also rigorously identifying the best solution via the integration of both absolute improvement degree and relative development balance of the multi-objective system.During which,by combining the interval AHP and the interval entropy method,the weight of each objective can be determined;by incorporating a vector-based MADM method in to the MOO model,a set of Pareto frontiers in the MOO problem can be simplified by a unique solution generated by the the MADM-MOO combination.More importantly,the advantages of the framework with respect to weighting the objectives,formulating the optimization model,and handling the uncertainties within the decision-making were verified by analyzing the obtained results via the vector-based analysis,sensitivity analysis,and result comparison. |
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