An innovative sustainability-oriented multi-criteria decision making framework for prioritization of industrial systems with interdependent factors: Method and a case study of electricity generation

With the development of technology and manufacturing, the conflicts between environment protection, economic interest and social benefit have been awared and paid more attention to in recent years. The sustainability performance has been considered by increasing number of decision makers. In the real-life practice, it will strongly affect the prioritization results if the criteria considered in the sustainability assessment are interdependent. Therefore, a non-orthogonal coordinate system based multi-criteria decision making method which can incorporate the interactions and interdependences among the criteria for sustainability assessment is proposed in this study. An illustrative case about electricity production was used to illustrate the developed sustainability prioritization model. The results obtained by the proposed method are compared with that based on the traditional method, and sensitivity analysis is also carried out. The results reveal that it is prerequisite to incorporate the interactions and interdependences between sustainability-oriented decision-maker, and the developed non-orthogonal coordinates based sustainability assessment framework is feasible for the prioritization of industrial systems with the considerations of the interactions and interdependences among the evaluation criteria.