A group decision-making method for technology selection of petrochemical enterprises

Selecting appropriate energy conservation and emission reduction technologies is essential for the sustainable developments of petrochemical enterprises. It usually involves experienced experts from multi-domain and thus can be regarded as a large-scale group decision-making problem. Existing methods assumed that different experts use the same linguistic term set following the same semantics to express their evaluation values, and derived the ranking of alternatives by an indirectly obtained group preference matrix. Such an approach may induce information loss. To avoid these defects, this study introduces a model based on rank centrality and expert differences to choose appropriate technologies for petrochemical enterprises. First, an attitude parameter is introduced into a linguistic scale function to unify different judgment benchmarks of experts regarding the same linguistic term. Next, a direct weight elicitation method based on rank centrality is developed to deduce the individual rank vector of alternatives. A grey clustering method based on the similarities of individual rank vectors is extended to cluster experts into small groups, and the silhouette coefficient is used to determine clusters weights. Afterwards, the rank vectors of alternatives corresponding to subgroups and the global rank vector are calculated by the weighted averaging operator. Alternatives are ranked by the rank vector of the global group. Finally, four technologies were evaluated by the model, and the preferred technology was identified. The findings indicate that the proposed technology selection model alleviates information loss, elevates group consensus level, and provides a perspective for petrochemical enterprises in search of energy conservation and emission reduction technologies.