Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis of Road Transportation Fuels and Vehicles: A Systematic Review and Classification of the Literature

Abstract

Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods help decision makers to consider and weigh diverse criteria that include economic, environmental, social and technological aspects. This characteristic makes them a popular tool to comparatively evaluate road transportation fuels and vehicles (RTFV). The aim of this paper is to systematically classify and analyse the literature applying MCDA methods on the evaluation of RTFV. To this end, 40 relevant papers are pinpointed and discussed. We identified a great number of evaluation criteria employed in the reviewed papers from which we have established a concluding list of 41 criteria, that can serve as a pool for future research. A further analysis of the evaluation criteria reveals that the process of criteria selection partly suffers from a lack of scientific foundation and standardization. We propose to standardize the criteria selection process by using the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodology as a guiding reference. In addition, we compared the MCDA results obtained from studies with relatively similar setups and found that the evaluation results are also generally similar and seem not to be influenced by the particular MCDA method employed. Based on the results of the reviewed papers, one may say that electricity and ethanol appear to be good alternatives for light vehicles, whereas gaseous fuels seem more appropriate for heavy vehicles like buses. Striking deviations from these generally observed results are often caused by specific evaluation contexts, particular criteria taken into account and unusual weight sets applied.The last category (c) is concerned with hydrogen in particular, as is a potential energy carrier in the aforementioned fuel cell vehicles. Three specific hydrogen production paths are evaluated, i.e., electrolysis, steam reforming and gasification, sourced from different feedstock [11][12][13][14][15]. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis MethodsThis Section shortly outlines the MCDA methods most often used in the reviewed papers. MCDA methods can be broadly divided in Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) with limited solutions for a finite set of alternatives and Multi-Objective Decision Making (MODM) with indefinite solutions for an indefinite set of possible scenarios [16]. MODM methods usually comprise some form of optimization, for instance linear or nonlinear programming. These methods start with certain restrictions which determine the optimal solution [17] and find a solution by optimizing the resulting

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