A Novel General Data Envelopment Analysis Based Approach for MCDM Issues of Hydrogen Energy under a Fuzzy Environment

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) issues related to hydrogen energy usually involve weight consideration of evaluation criteria, ambiguous evaluation information provided by experts, and lacking or incomplete evaluation information. Conventionally, the MCDM calculation method cannot effectively and simultaneously process evaluation information. To effectively address this issue, this study proposed a novel general data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based approach for MCDM issues of hydrogen energy under a fuzzy environment. The proposed general DEA-based approach integrates the typical DEA method, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS), and the soft set to process the MCDM problems under a fuzzy environment. For the numerical verification, this study used the case of hydrogen energy key technologies ranking, as an important development reference for carbon reduction to further verify the correctness and reasonableness of the proposed approach. The calculation results were also compared with those from the typical DEA method, typical AHP/DEA method, and the fuzzy AHP/DEA method. The numerical verification results show that the proposed method can effectively process the MCDM problems under a fuzzy environment than listing different calculation methods.