A Hybrid Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Photovoltaic Solar Plant Location Selection

Amy H. I. Lee, He-Yau Kang and You-Jyun Liou
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Amy H. I. Lee: Department of Technology Management, Chung Hua University, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan
He-Yau Kang: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 411, Taiwan
You-Jyun Liou: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 411, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 2, 1-21

Abstract: Due to decaying fossil resource and increasing environmental consciousness, the demand of renewable energy resources is escalating these days. Photovoltaic solar energy is one of the most popular renewable energy resources in places where sunlight is abundant. The selection of a desirable location for constructing a photovoltaic solar plant is the ?rst and one of the most important stages in the plant construction to provide a long-term energy production. In this paper, a comprehensive multiple-criteria decision-making model, which incorporates the interpretive structural modeling (ISM), fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska OptimizacijaI Kompromisno Resenje in Serbian,meaning multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution), is proposed to select the most suitable photovoltaic solar plant location. The ISM is applied ?rst to determine the interrelationships among the criteria and among the sub-criteria,andtheresults are used to construct a decision-making network. The FANP is applied next to solve the network and to calculate the importance weights of the sub-criteria. Finally, the VIKOR is adopted to determine the ranking of the photovoltaic solar plant locations. The proposed model is applied in a case study in evaluating photovoltaic solar plant locations in Taiwan. By applying the proposed model, decision makers can have a better thinking process and make more appropriate decisions justi?ably.

Keywords: photovoltaic; location selection; interpretive structural modeling (ISM); fuzzy analytic network process (FANP); VIKOR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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