Innovative solar energy technology selection using intiutionistic fuzzy sets

Abstract

Solar energy technologies are mainly composed of photovoltaics and concentrated solar power (solar thermal) technologies. Photovoltaic technology converts sunlight into electricity directly whereas solar thermal technology utilizes its heat. Innovative solar energy technologies appear in the market relatively more often than other energy technologies. Selection among these innovative solar energy technologies is a multi-criteria decision making problem under uncertain environment conditions. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets provide an efficient way of capturing uncertainty by processing both membership and non-membership degrees in a set, whose sum of these degrees is not necessarily equal to one. In this paper, we use an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy AHP method for the multi-criteria evaluation of some innovative solar energy technologies. An application of solar energy technology selection is also presented through the proposed method.