A Novel Z-Fuzzy AHP&EDAS Methodology and Its Application to Wind Turbine Selection

Modelling the reliability information in decision making process is an important issue to inclusively reflect the thoughts of decision makers. The Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are frequently used MCDM methods, yet their fuzzy extensions in the literature are incapable of representing the reliability of experts’ fuzzy preferences, which may have important effects on the results. The first goal of this study is to extend the EDAS method by using Z-fuzzy numbers to reinforce its representation ability of fuzzy linguistic expressions. The second goal is to propose a decision making methodology for the solution of fuzzy MCDM problems by using Z-fuzzy AHP method for determining the criteria weights and Z-fuzzy EDAS method for the selection of the best alternative. The contribution of the study is to present an MCDM based decision support tool for the managers under vague and imprecise data, which also considers the reliability of these data. The applicability of the proposed model is presented with an application to wind energy investment problem aiming at the selection of the best wind turbine. Finally, the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by making a comparative analysis with the Z-fuzzy TOPSIS method. The results show that the proposed methodology can not only represent experts’ evaluation information extensively, but also reveal a logical and consistent sequence related to wind turbine alternatives using reliability information.