Fuzzy Multi-actor Multi-criteria Decision Making for sustainability assessment of biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production

The purpose of this paper is to develop a sustainability assessment method to rank the prior sequence of biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production. A novel fuzzy Multi-actor Multi-criteria Decision Making method which allows multiple groups of decision-makers to use linguistic variables to assess the biomass-based technologies for hydrogen production has been developed. Fifteen criteria relevant to in economic, environmental, technological and social-political aspects have been used in sustainability assessment. Four biomass-based technologies including pyrolysis, conventional gasification, supercritical water gasification and fermentative hydrogen production have been studied by the proposed method, and biomass gasification has been considered as the most sustainable scenario and can be chosen for further development. Copyright (C) 2013, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.