Title : Hybrid decision-making for prioritizing biofuel supply chain challenges in Norway based on AHP and DEMATEL approaches
Abstract:
By almost 75%, Norway has Europe's highest share of renewable energy. However, Norway's bioenergy supply constitutes a small portion of the total energy supply. The most common form of renewable energy is bioenergy, which generates more energy than all other forms combined. There are a variety of biomass resources, including agricultural crop residues, forestry residues, wood processing residues, algae, dedicated energy crops, as well as municipal and wet organic waste. Bioenergy consumption in Norway has historically ranged between 4 and 6% of the total primary energy supply (TPES). The present study aims to identify the most significant biofuel supply chain challenges in Norway and prioritize them. This study integrates the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) for developing a unique multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) to identify and prioritize challenges facing the biomass supply chain in Norway. From the literature, thirty-seven challenge indicators under nine main dimensions have been selected. In order to determine the significance and causal relationships among the main dimensions for biofuel supply chain challenges, DEMATEL was applied by considering the relationship between them. As a result, six dimensions such as low rate of return, market challenges, environmental impacts, credit, social impacts, and biomass challenges were identified as causes and technology and design, political and regulatory challenges, and ecological and geographical barriers were identified as effects. In the final step, the AHP method was applied on identifies causes from DEMATEL to obtain the final ranking. Results indicated that the low rate of return and environmental concerns were the most significant challenges in Norway. Using the hybrid DEMATEL-AHP approach can cover the limitations of each method to reach more trusted results. Due to its inherent flexibility, the current method can be applied to different dimensions under various conditions and used by decision-makers.
