A heterogeneous evaluation model for assessing sustainable energy: A Belgian case study

Decision makers are increasingly involved in complex real decisions that require multiple viewpoints. A specific case of this fact is the evaluation of sustainable policies related to environment and energy sectors. In this evaluation process, different scenarios are evaluated according to multiple desired criteria that might have different nature. These evaluation processes aim to obtain an overall assessment for each scenario with a complete description of the different related criteria to compare the alternate scenarios for a ranking among them with the goal of identifying the best one. In such complex decision making problems a key problem is the modelling of experts´ assessments for each criterion of the scenarios due to the vagueness, uncertainty and nature of such assessments. In this contribution, we propose an evaluation model applied to energy policy selection based on the decision analysis that can manage different types of information (numerical, interval-valued and linguistic) and eventually models linguistically the experts´ information with the aim of facilitating the interpretation and keeping accurate results. We apply this model to a case study for evaluating Belgian long-term sustainable energy scenarios.