An Integrated Neutrosophic Approach for the Urban Energy Internet Assessment under Sustainability Dimensions

Abstract

The urgent issue of climate change has resulted in an increasing preoccupation with the transition to low-carbon energy. The urban energy internet (UEI) enables the efficient utilization of renewable energy via the integration of contemporary energy grids, smart energy services, and cyber-physical systems. Consequently, the assessment of urban energy is vital for the construction of low-carbon cities. This study intends to provide an integrated decision-making approach for addressing assessment challenges related to UEI, with a focus on sustainability. The introduced approach adopts the opinions of three experts to express their opinions through semantic terms in evaluating sustainability factors and evaluating UEI projects. Determining the most suitable project for sustainable UEI is a difficult task. In addition, there are multiple sustainability dimensions, including: economic, social, technical, environmental and resource dimension. This paper presents an integrated approach through which experts can use semantic terms to express their opinions to evaluate the priorities of sustainability dimensions that affect the sustainability of UEI projects. Therefore, this study applies a hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach that takes into account multiple dimensions. Also, the uncertainty in the study is handled by type 2 neutrosophic numbers (T2NNs). Initially, the CRiteria Importance through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method was used to determine the relative importance of the sustainability dimensions used in the study. Also, the evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method was used to rank the selected alternatives. The results indicate that the technical dimension is the most important with a weight of 0.384. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to prove the validity and reliability of the developed framework with differences in weights.