Setting Thresholds to Define Indifferences and Preferences in PROMETHEE for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of European Hydrogen Production

Abstract

The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a proven method for sustainability assessment. However, the interpretation phase of an LCSA is challenging because many different single results are obtained. Additionally, performing a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is one way—not only for LCSA—to gain clarity about how to interpret the results. One common form of MCDAs are outranking methods. For these type of methods it becomes of utmost importance to clarify when results become preferable. Thus, thresholds are commonly used to prevent decisions based on results that are actually indifferent between the analyzed options. In this paper, a new approach is presented to identify and quantify such thresholds for Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) based on uncertainty of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods. Common thresholds and this new approach are discussed using a case study on finding a preferred location for sustainable industrial hydrogen production, comparing three locations in European countries. The single LCSA results indicated different preferences for the environmental, economic and social assessment. The application of PROMETHEE helped to find a clear solution. The comparison of the newly-specified thresholds based on LCIA uncertainty with default thresholds provided important insights of how to interpret the LCSA results regarding industrial hydrogen production.

Weighting factor elicitation for sustainability assessment of energy technologies

“…technology A is better than technology B, the usual preference function is sufficient, and no thresholds need to be defined. As thresholds q and p for the environmental indicators (index i ) 5 and 10% of the minimum value across all analysed options ( A , …, N ) were chosen, respectively, to account for any uncertainty, 58 see eqn (5). q i = 0.05 Min( A i , B i ,…, N i ) and p i = 0.10 Min( A i , B i ,…, N i )…”

“…qualitative, discrete or continuous. 58 Implementation. The implementation of SMART and PROMETHEE is presented in the following two sections.…”

A distance-to-sustainability-target approach for indicator aggregation and its application for the comparison of wind energy alternatives

“…Accordingly, the strong performance in one sustainability criterion does not compensate for the weak performance of another criterion, which is the definition of strong sustainability [43]. PROMETHEE is frequently used in sustainability studies, e.g for ranking energy policy alternatives, [44], locations [45] or local energy generation options [46,47]. ELECTRE is used for various sustainability assessments, e.g.…”

“…Although some methods are already applied for LCSA results, such as WSM [8], PROMETHEE [45] and TOPSIS [69], there is a certain ambiguity in the choice of aggregation procedures for LCSA. To counter this ambiguity, criteria for MCDA methods were defined, with the objective to supply a robust sustainability indicator for energy technologies.…”

Methodological Framework to Select Evaluation Criteria for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis of Road Transportation Fuels and Vehicles

“…Wulf et al [33] propose a new approach to exclude irrelevant data from LCSA based decision making. To this end, they propose a specific MCDA method to identify and quantify thresholds that can be used to exclude irrelevant data.…”