Multi-expert wind energy technology selection using interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets

• A multi-expert hierarchical multicriteria fuzzy method using linguistic terms.
• It can aggregate the linguistic assessments of more than one expert.
• An IVIF pairwise comparison based evaluation using a new linguistic scale.
• A first attempt to prioritize wind energy technologies using IVIFS.
• The proposed method is relatively more efficient than the existing methods.

Wind energy has been one of the popular and important energy sources since it is a clean, safe, affordable, and bountiful energy source present in nature. The evaluation of wind energy investments requires a large number of tangible and intangible criteria which may conflict with each other. Our study concentrates on the evaluation of wind energy investments and aims to select the appropriate wind energy technology to help investors. The problem is constructed as a multi-expert multicriteria decision making problem. To deal with vagueness, ambiguity and subjectivity in the human evaluation processes, an IVIF (interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy) approach is proposed. IVIF sets can better handle hesitancy and uncertainty in defining membership functions. Our approach realizes the overall performance measurement of wind energy technology alternatives through the aggregation of IVIF pairwise comparison matrices and calculation of score judgment and possibility degree matrices. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to assess the robustness of the results obtained from the model. The comparative results show that the proposed method produces a consistent ranking among the alternative technologies and the sensitivity analysis indicates that this ranking is sufficiently robust to invest in the first ranked alternative.