Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis towards Promoting Socio-Economy, Energy and Environment Management Strategies

Dear Colleagues,

Socio-economic, energy, and environmental management strategies have become key issues to achieve better sustainability and ensure a healthier society and environment. With this in mind, sustainable practices should ensure that economic, social and environmental considerations are included in the decision-making process. Challenges are mainly related to the minimization of waste and the circular economy, more sustainable mobility in cities, land use, energy sources, and consumption behaviours.

Thus, this Special Issue is about sustainability strategies. It aims to present original research articles providing new highlights on how multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can help to promote socio-economic, energy, and environemental sustainability strategies. This involves treating current and emerging problems associated with the sustainable management of resources and behaviours and modeling techniques that are able to integrate the three dimensions of sustainability in the analysis. Studies about multi-stakeholders’ views, couple uncertainty modeling techniques with MCDM techniques, and comparisons of ideal solution-based results with other MCDM techniques are important welcome contributions.

In the literature, several approaches are available for sustainability evaluation, such as life cycle analysis (LCA), cost–benefit analysis (CBA), assement indicator models (AIM) and multicriteria decision making (MCDM). This last approach is of great importance to deal with complex sustainability problems because it has the advantage of being a framework for structuring problems and a set of methods able to generate preferences among alternatives.

Reccently, MCDA methods have largely been used because they allow for the simultaneous integration of opposing criteria and provide more robust solutions compared with other decision support systems. MCDA is a flexible approach, since it is possible to integrate it with other tools, such as LCA, ecological footprint, or environmental indicators, among others. Three broad categories of MDCA techniques can be considered: value measurement models; goal, aspiration, reference level or ideal-solution based models; and outranking models. The value measurement models assign a numeric score to each alternative, and these scores are then aggregated to the sum of criteria weights and the value of the alternatives. The goal, aspiration, reference level, or ideal-solution based models rank alternatives based on their closeness to a reference level or ideal solution. The outranking models compare alternatives pair-wise for each criterion and determine the extent to which one alternative outranks another.

Sustainability evaluations require a MCDA technique able to integrate economic, social, environmental, and technological criteria in a balanced form. Optimal sustainable solutions should satisfy both attributes associated with where the supply chain facilities will be located and the decision makers' targets. For promoting socio-economic, energy, and environment management strategies, a decision tool should define alternatives, relevant criteria, and the respective weights. Related problems, such as the optimal location of facilities or the choice of alternative strategies, require the involvement of multiple stakeholders with different or conflicting goals. To achieve a consensus and to allow for realistic decision-making, MCDA techniques help stakeholders to assess conflicting criteria,  express their choices, and rank the studied alternatives.

Despite a large number of articles on sustainability having recently been published, there is a significant research gap in the literature.  This gap is related to the use of MCDA techniques to study decision-making solutions to complex problems involving socio-economic, energy, and environmental management strategies. To fill this gap, formal effort is still necessary to conduct a critical literature review of MCDA studies related to sustainability problems; assess different technological solutions (anaerobic digestion, incineration, gasification, pyrolysis, landfill to bioenergy and electric mobility); decide on the optimal location of facilities; and optimize supply chain management strategies to minimize waste and reduce the consumption of energy and resources. The findings and highlights provided from this Special Issue are particularly important for researchers on sustainability, policy-makers, decision-makers, and specific and general stakeholders.

Prof. Dr. Rui Manuel de Sousa Fragoso
Dr. António Manuel de Sousa Xavier
Dr. Maria De Belém Costa Freitas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• sustainability evaluation
• sustainable management
• multicriteria decision analysis
• decision support
• modeling
• simulation
• bio-systems
• energy
• ecosystem vulnerability
• ecosystem resilience
• technological solutions
• optimal location
• decarbonization
• sustainable consumption
• circular economy
• green economy
• land use