Sustainability prioritization of sewage sludge to energy scenarios with hybrid-data consideration: a fuzzy decision-making framework based on full consistency method and fusion ranking model.

This work proposed a novel mathematical framework for the sustainability assessment of sewage sludge to energy (SStE) scenarios, by resorting to fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCMD) methods. In which, an evaluation system including twelve criteria from four dimensions was introduced, while the fuzzy triangular number (TFN) was used to address the hybrid-data issue in the decision-making. More importantly, four fuzzy MCDM methods were used to make the following methodological contributions: (1) the fuzzy full consistency method (FUCOM) was extended into uncertain conditions to determine the weights easily and reliably, which preserves the consistency in ambiguous, subjective judgments; (2) a novel TFN-based fusion ranking model was developed by aggregating three fuzzy MCDM approaches, which not only takes the hybrid data as input information for decision-making (by combining the TFN) but also promotes the confidence in final prioritization (by reconciling different sequences). Four illustrative SStE scenarios were studied to test the feasibility of the model. Besides, the effectiveness and advantages of the model were verified by results comparison and discussion.