Assessment of Energy Systems Using Extended Fuzzy AHP, Fuzzy VIKOR, and TOPSIS Approaches to Manage Non-Cooperative Opinions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

- Add a title for the table 2.

- Authors need to provide a diagram or flowchart to show the procedure of the research. 

- Remove highlighted green parts in the keywords section.

- The abstract should be presented in one paragraph. 

- In abstract and other sections of the paper, authors need to add keywords descriptions, for example, AHP, VIKOR, MCDM, ELECTRE, etc.

- Authors need to add a new section as Related Works or Literature review, in this regard, section 2 can be Related Works or Literature Review, in this new section authors need to provide the application of decision making methods and fuzzy sets in energy systems as well as renewable energy systems, there are several published papers which authors can use for this section. 

- The structure of the paper should be added at the end of the introduction. 

- All tables should be edited based on journal requirements.

- The same comment is regarding the formulas and the number of formulas, for example, the number of formulas 2 shifted to the next line. The same problem formulas number 3, 4, etc. The numbers of some of the formulas also are missed. Actually the format of the formulas is not appropriate, I do not know why authors did not check these errors, however, please edit these issues very carefully. 

- The details of data collection and experts opinions should be provided in the section results and findings. Authors only provided one sentence about this issue, therefore, you need to extend this information in details. 

- The related references should be added in the criteria table, it means, what are the resources of these criteria? Where did you find these criteria? And how did you select these criteria? Why do you think these criteria are appropriate for assessment of energy systems? however, you need to add this information in the paper. 

- The title of table 13 is too long. 

- The title of table 14 is also not suitable.

- The results of the study should be compared with other existing methods. It means the comparison methods should be provided to validate of the proposed method. 

- Sensitivity analysis should be provided to the validity of the results. Comparison methods and sensitivity analysis are two important tests in decision making process which authors missed these two tests. 

- The advantages of the proposed method should be discussed in the discussion section. 

- Add some recommendations for further research in term of energy systems in Saudi Arabia, for example, how Saudi Arabia can improve their energy systems? Or how the finding of your study can be useful for Saudi Arabia energy systems. 

- I think the title should be revised because this journal is related to sustainability and sustainable development issues, so, it is not necessary to add the details of the extended method in the title, so, my suggestion title is: "Assessment of energy systems using extended fuzzy AHP and VIKOR approaches", however, you also feel free to edit the title.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, a case study is presented. The authors apply an integrated fuzzy AHP and fuzzy VIKOR method reveal the most proper energy system investment in Saudi Arabia. The case study is of interest for the readers of the journal. However, there are some points that the authors need to address:

- A justification is missing on the selection of the criteria in Table 1. Are all these criteria independent to one another? Which criteria do other works use? Moreover, the authors elected only nine of the criteria presented in Table 1. Why is that?

- The authors do not explain sufficiently how they acquired the pairwise comparisons in Table 3.

- The authors use fuzzy AHP and fuzzy VIKOR. They also state that other GDM techniques can be used. How would they cope with the differences in the rankings among different GDM methods?

- How these results compare against other proposed models in the literature?

 

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors still need to do some comments which they missed in the revision, some concerns to improve the paper are:

 

-Sensitivity analysis should be added in the paper, sensitivity is a very important step of each decision making process, without this step, the decision making process is wrong. 

-The second important issue is about comparison method, this is not mean, you compare your results with the literature, you must test your results with other existing methods in the literature. 

Therefore, sensitivity analysis and comparison methods must be provided in this paper.

-Another lack of revision is related to data collection, the details of the experts, you need to provide some more information about the data collection, did you collect the real data? Or a numeric example? In any kind of data, you need to clear these issues. 

-Some abbreviations still should be added, for example, DEMATEL etc.

-There are some other important references about application of decision making in renewable energy selection which authors need to find to add in section 2, I have found some: 

 

A Group Decision Framework for Renewable Energy Source Selection under Interval-Valued Probabilistic linguistic Term Set, Energies, 13 (2020) 986.

A novel approach to extended fuzzy TOPSIS based on new divergence measures for renewable energy sources selection, Journal of Cleaner Production, 257 (2020) 120352.

Scientific Decision Framework for Evaluation of Renewable Energy Sources under Q-Rung Orthopair Fuzzy Set with Partially Known Weight Information, Sustainability, 11 (2019).

An Integrated Delphi-AHP and Fuzzy TOPSIS Approach toward Ranking and Selection of Renewable Energy Resources in Pakistan, Processes, 7 (2019) 118.

Balanced scorecard-based analysis of investment decisions for the renewable energy alternatives: A comparative analysis based on the hybrid fuzzy decision-making approach, Energy, 175 (2019) 1259-1270.

Yüksel, Multidimensional evaluation of global investments on the renewable energy with the integrated fuzzy decision-making model under the hesitancy, International Journal of Energy Research, 43 (2019) 1775-1784.

Improving renewable energy policy planning and decision-making through a hybrid MCDM method, Energy Policy, 137 (2020) 111174.

A novel VIKOR approach based on entropy and divergence measures of Pythagorean fuzzy sets to evaluate renewable energy technologies in India, Journal of Cleaner Production, 238 (2019) 117936.

 

I would like to check the revised version of the paper to ensure the paper is improved very well after this revision. 

Author Response

Please see attachement.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In their revised paper, the authors addressed three of my comments, but they did not address my last point:

"How these results compare against other proposed models in the literature?"

The authors have not compared their results against any model proposed in the literature. Therefore, they do not justify why they used fuzzy AHP and fuzzy VIKOR and not use other fuzzy GDM methods.

 

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is ready for publication. 

 

Thank you

Good Luck

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed all my comments. Therefore, the paper can be accepted for publication.