Multi-Criteria Decision Making After Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Under Hybrid Information

Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA), as the combination of life cycle assessment (LCA), life cycle costing (LCC), and social life cycle assessment (SLCA), can be used as a powerful tool for simultaneously investigating the environmental, economic, and social aspects of energy and industrial systems. However, the results of LCSA usually involve multiple types of data. Crisp numbers and interval numbers are usually used in LCA and LCC, but the relative performances with respect to some of the social criteria (especially the “soft” criteria) determined in SLCA cannot be quantified directly, and the linguistic variables, which can be transformed into various types of fuzzy numbers, are more suitable to describe the relative performances of energy and industrial systems with respect to these “soft” criteria. This study aims to develop a multi-criteria decision-making method (an improved goal programming method) for ranking energy and industrial systems using hybrid information. An illustrative case including five electricity generation systems is studied, and the results reveal that the proposed method can help the stakeholders to select the most sustainable energy and industrial system using hybrid information.