Methodology of location selection for biofuel refinery based on fuzzy TOPSIS

Abstract

With the development of the biofuel industry, the biofuel refinery location problem received a lot of attention from academics increasingly. The aim of this paper is to develop a decision-making methodology for planning biofuel refinery locations under a fuzzy environment based on fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), in which the vagueness and subjectivity are handled with linguistics variables parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. TOPSIS is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) technique which determines the best alternative by calculating the distances from the positive and negative ideal solutions according to the evaluation scores of the experts. Finally, by founding 9 criteria and 32 sub-criteria in the emerging biofuel refinery location assessment frameworks, the approach was demonstrated using the case of Guangdong Zhongneng Alcohol CO., LTD. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithms solve the problem effectively.