Multi-criteria applications in renewable energy analysis: A literature review

Renewable energies are rising as solutions for a sustainable, environmentally friendly and long-term cost effective sources of energies for the future. Renewable energy decision making can be viewed as a multiple criteria decision-making problem with correlating criteria and alternatives. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDM) offer a flexible tool that is able to handle and bring together a wide range of variables and thus offer useful assistance to the decision maker in mapping out the situation. MCDM methods can be divided into two categories, multi-objective decision making (MODM) and multi-attribute decision making (MADM). A review of 90+ published papers of MCDM analysis in the renewable energy field is presented in this paper. Classification of both application area as well as methodology used are summarized. Analysis reveals that AHP is the most used of all MCDM methodologies.