A multi-criteria decision making for renewable energy selection using Z-numbers in uncertain environment

In recent era of globalization, the world is perceiving an alarming rise in its energy consumption resulting in shortage of fossil fuels in near future. Developing countries like India, with fast growing population and economy, is planning to explore among its existing renewable energy sources to meet the acute shortage of overall domestic energy supply. For balancing diverse ecological, social, technical and economic features, selection among alternative renewable energy must be addressed in a multi-criteria context considering both subjective and objective criteria weights. In the proposed COPRAS-Z methodology, Z-number model fuzzy numbers with reliability degree to represents imprecise judgment of decision makers’ in evaluating the weights of criteria and selection of renewable energy alternatives. The fuzzy numbers are defuzzified and renewable energy alternatives are prioritized as per COmplex PropoRtional ASsessment (COPRAS) decision making method in terms of significance and utility degree. A sensitivity analysis is done to observe the variation in ranking of the criteria, by altering the coefficient of both subjective and objective weight. Also, the proposed methodology is compared with existing multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for checking validity of the obtained ranking result.