Fuzzy Ensemble of Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods for Heating Energy Transition in Danish Households

Abstract

More than 110 countries, including 500 cities worldwide, have set the goal of reaching carbon neutrality. Heating contributes to most of the residential energy consumption and carbon emissions. The green energy transition of fossil-based heating systems is needed to reach the emission goals. However, heating systems vary in energy source, heating technology, equipment location, and these complexities make it challenging for households to compare heating systems and make decisions. Hence, a decision support tool that provides a generalized ranking of individual heating alternatives is proposed for households as decision makers to identify the optimal choice. This paper presents an analysis of 13 heating alternatives and 19 quantitative criteria in technological, environmental, and financial aspects, combines ideal solution-based multi-criteria decision making with 6 weighting methods and 4 normalization methods, and introduces ensemble learning with a fuzzy membership function derived from Cauchy distribution to finalize the ultimate ranking. The robustness of the proposed method is verified by three sensitive analyses from different aspects. Air-to-water heat pump, solar heating and direct district heating are the top three rankings in the final result under Danish national average data. A framework is designed to guide decision makers to apply this ranking guideline with their practical, feasible situations.

An energy demand-side management and net metering decision framework

“…MCDM is considered a dynamic and complex method that supports decision making in management engineering [34], and has also been introduced to decision making in energy operations, e.g., [35]. The Technique of Ordered Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) became one of the most favored energy sector problemsolving approaches thanks to its relatively logical and rational [36], and the alternative with the shortest distance from the positive ideal solution and the longest distance from the negative ideal solution is selected.…”

Decision Support for Energy Transition : Application of Multi-criteria Decision Making on Danish Residential Heating

“…A representative sample of 138 papers was identified using search strings combinations, then screened based on their titles, abstracts, and, in some cases, a quick read of the full paper if it was difficult to determine the relevance from the abstract. Eight papers were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion conditions, where Wen et al (2021) was excluded since it is the Paper I appended to this thesis. Moreover, Chinese et al (2011) was included even with an industrial case, since it was just a single building with similar heating alternatives and extensively compared to residential heating.…”