Use of MCDM techniques for energy policy and decision-making problems: A review

Abstract

Energy consumption increases all over the world as a result of industrialization in recent years. In this context, it has become important to meet increasing energy demand. It is significant to find alternative energy sources because of limited nonrenewable energy sources such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas. At this point, renewable energy sources have an important role to meet energy requirement. As a result, decision and policy making for energy is completely critical issue for countries. Various technical, economic, environmental, and social criteria are used to solve energy policy and decision-making problems such as evaluation of energy projects, selection among energy alternatives, power plant site selection, and determining energy policy. Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) methods are used as effective tools to help decision makers while solving energy problems. There are a large number of studies including articles, conference papers, and book chapters, which examine energy problems by using MCDM methods in the literature. Therefore, analyzing these studies according to different features such as publication year, MCDM method, document type, statistical analyses, country, and published journal can be beneficial for leading researchers who study in energy decision-making field. In this study, published papers, which use traditional MCDM methods to handle energy problems, are examined systematically. By the way, it is aimed to lead to researchers regarding MCDM methods which are utilized in energy applications. It also conducted some statistical analyses to obtain trends between years and MCDM methods. Besides, recent developments in energy field are presented through this comprehensive literature review.