Multi-criteria sustainability assessment and decision-making framework for hydrogen pathways prioritization: An extended ELECTRE method under hybrid information

Abstract Hydrogen has been received more and more attentions because of its advantage in terms of low environmental impact and high energy density. However, the sustainability priorities of different hydrogen production pathways have not been determined. To assist the sustainability-oriented selection of hydrogen production pathways, a prioritization framework needs to be built. However, the data collected from different sources consisting of hybrid information, such as crisp numbers, interval numbers, and fuzzy numbers, increases the difficulty of sustainability-oriented decision-making. Therefore, this study aims to develop a sustainability prioritization framework for hydrogen production pathways under hybrid information. The Z-number Best Worst Method (ZBWM) is applied to quantify the weight of each criterion from the views of decision-makers in the forms of Z-number. The ELECTRE method has been extended to prioritize the alternatives under the context of hybrid information. An illustrative case including five hydrogen production processes is used to illustrate the proposed prioritization framework from environmental, social, economic, and technical aspects, and the results show that biomass hydrogen technology is the most sustainable choice. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed model, other three multi-criteria decision making methods were also used to determine the sustainability rankings of these five hydrogen production pathways, and the comparisons reveal that this method is feasible.