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21 pages, 1224 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hybrid Predictive Decision-Making Approach to Emission Reduction Policies for Sustainable Energy Industry

by Chao Zhou, Dongyu Liu, Pengfei Zhou, Jie Luo, Serhat Yuksel and Hasan Dincer

Energies 2020, 13(9), 2220; https://doi.org/10.3390/en13092220 - 2 May 2020

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 3051

Carbon emissions are a prominent issue for sustainable energy production and management. Energy policies under the growing competitive environment could change the priorities of emission reduction and investment decisions. This paper aims to forecast carbon emissions from China and to rank the importance of carbon emissions with interval type 2 (IT2) fuzzy sets (FS) for sustainable energy investments. For this purpose, the quadratic model is applied to measuring emission trends and the Qualitative Flexible Multiple Criteria Method (QUALIFLEX) is used for measuring sustainable energy investment alternatives by the several emission levels. Forecasted values of 29 provinces in China are converted into the linguistic and fuzzy numbers based on IT2 FS respectively to measure the priorities of emission reduction for sustainable economies. The novelty of this paper is to propose a hybrid decision-making approach based on quadratic modeling and the QUALIFLEX method and to discuss the overall energy emission trend and policies for sustainable economic growth. The results demonstrate that emission reduction policies are the most important phenomenon and the environmental factors should be widely considered to construct sustainable energy investments and production. Full article

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19 pages, 967 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Assessing the Performance of Green Mines via a Hesitant Fuzzy ORESTE–QUALIFLEX Method

by Weizhang Liang, Bing Dai, Guoyan Zhao and Hao Wu

Mathematics 2019, 7(9), 788; https://doi.org/10.3390/math7090788 - 27 Aug 2019

Cited by 34 | Viewed by 3199

Abstract

Due to various environmental issues caused by resource exploitation, establishing green mines is an essential measure to realize sustainable growth for mining companies. This research aimed to develop a novel methodology to evaluate the performance of green mines within hesitant fuzzy conditions. First, hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs) were used to express original fuzzy assessment values. Then, the extended expert grading approach and the modified maximum deviation method with HFNs were combined to determine comprehensive importance degrees of criteria. Afterward, the traditional qualitative flexible (QUALIFLEX) method was integrated with the Organísation, rangement et synthèse de données relationnelles (ORESTE) model to achieve the rankings of mines. Finally, the proposed hesitant fuzzy ORESTE–QUALIFLEX approach was utilized to evaluate the performance of green mines. In addition, the robustness of the method was verified by a sensitivity analysis, while the effectiveness and strengths were certified by a comparison analysis. The results indicate that the proposed methodology has great robustness and advantages and that it is feasible and effective for the performance evaluation of green mines under hesitant fuzzy environment. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Operations Research Using Fuzzy Sets Theory)

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17 pages, 947 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Green Supplier Evaluation and Selection Using Cloud Model Theory and the QUALIFLEX Method

by Ke-Qin Wang, Hu-Chen Liu, Liping Liu and Jia Huang

Sustainability 2017, 9(5), 688; https://doi.org/10.3390/su9050688 - 27 Apr 2017

Cited by 80 | Viewed by 8096

Abstract

Nowadays, companies have to improve their practices in the management of green supply chain with increased awareness of environmental issues worldwide. Selecting the optimum green supplier is crucial for green supply chain management, which is a challenging multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. Moreover, while evaluating the performance of alternative suppliers, decision makers tend to determine their assessments using linguistic descriptors due to experts’ vague knowledge and information deficiency. Therefore, this paper develops an integrated MCDM model based on the cloud model and QUALIFLEX (qualitative flexible multiple criteria method) approach to assess the green performance of companies under economic and environmental criteria. For the introduced model, the linguistic terms, expressed in normal clouds, are utilized to assess alternatives against each selection criterion. A linear programming model is established to compute the weights of criteria with unknown or incompletely known weight information. An extended QUALIFLEX approach is proposed and used to select the most suitable green supplier. Finally, the proposed green supplier selection method is demonstrated by an empirical example of an auto manufacturer to confirm its rationality and effectiveness. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability)

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18 pages, 556 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Uncertain Quality Function Deployment Using a Hybrid Group Decision Making Model

by Ze-Ling Wang, Jian-Xin You and Hu-Chen Liu

Symmetry 2016, 8(11), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym8110119 - 4 Nov 2016

Cited by 20 | Viewed by 6223

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely used quality system tool for translating customer requirements (CRs) into the engineering design requirements (DRs) of products or services. The conventional QFD analysis, however, has been criticized as having some limitations such as in the assessment of relationships between CRs and DRs, the determination of CR weights and the prioritization of DRs. This paper aims to develop a new hybrid group decision-making model based on hesitant 2-tuple linguistic term sets and an extended QUALIFLEX (qualitative flexible multiple criteria method) approach for handling QFD problems with incomplete weight information. First, hesitant linguistic term sets are combined with interval 2-tuple linguistic variables to express various uncertainties in the assessment information of QFD team members. Borrowing the idea of grey relational analysis (GRA), a multiple objective optimization model is constructed to determine the relative weights of CRs. Then, an extended QUALIFLEX approach with an inclusion comparison method is suggested to determine the ranking of the DRs identified in QFD. Finally, an analysis of a market segment selection problem is conducted to demonstrate and validate the proposed QFD approach. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Symmetry in Complex Networks II)

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17 pages, 1046 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Hesitant Trapezoidal Fuzzy QUALIFLEX Method and Its Application in the Evaluation of Green Supply Chain Initiatives

by Xiaolu Zhang, Zeshui Xu and Manfeng Liu

Sustainability 2016, 8(9), 952; https://doi.org/10.3390/su8090952 - 20 Sep 2016

Cited by 22 | Viewed by 5200

Abstract

This paper explores how to handle multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems in which the criteria values of alternatives take the form of comparative linguistic expressions. Firstly, the new concept of hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy numbers (HTrFNs) is provided to model the semantics of the comparative linguistic expressions. Then, the operational laws and the distance measures of HTrFNs are presented. Afterwards, a useful outranking method, the hesitant trapezoidal fuzzy QUALIFLEX method, is developed to handle the MCDM problems with hierarchical structure in the environment of HTrFN. At length, the proposed method is applied to evaluating green supply chain initiatives in order to achieve sustainable economic and environmental performance, and a case study concerned with a fashion retail chain is presented to demonstrate its feasibility and applicability, also, a comparative analysis with other relevant approaches is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Full article

(This article belongs to the Section Energy Sustainability)

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