Sustainability Analysis of Hydrogen Production Techniques: A Hybrid-Data-Type Multiple Criteria Decision-Making Model Extended From ELECTRE

Abstract

As an environmentally sustainable renewable energy source, hydrogen energy has received increasing attention and has been widely used in recent years. Although the use of hydrogen has a less environmental impact than other energy sources, the negative impacts of hydrogen production processes vary from one production process to another. Therefore, the choice of the production process is also a multi-attribute decision-making problem, which requires a scientific and comprehensive analysis method to assist decision-makers to choose according to actual conditions and preferences. This study aims at developing a sustainability prioritization framework for hydrogen production techniques selection by using hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method. The ELECTRE is revised to proceed with the hybrid-type data in hydrogen production methods selection. While a fuzzy intuitionistic pairwise comparison weighting method is applied to quantify the preferences of each criterion from the views of decision-makers in the forms of fuzzy numbers. To evaluate the model, three aspects of enablers, including environmental, social, and economic enablers, have been discussed in the MCDM comparison. Five hydrogen production processes as examples have been studied by the proposed method. The feasibility of the proposed model to deal with hybrid data in the hydrogen production technologies selection problem is proven by comparing the modeling results with the original case study data. The robustness of the proposed is further analyzed through sensitivity analysis. In this research, the hybrid ELECTRE is validated to be feasible in solving the hybrid-data-type hydrogen production techniques selection problem.

Keywords: sustainability analysis, hydrogen production, multi-criteria decision making, hybrid data, hybrid ELECTRE

JEL Classification: Q01