Decision framework of solar thermal power plant site selection based on linguistic Choquet operator

Site selection plays an important role in the entire life cycle of solar thermal power plant (STPP) and the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are very important in the whole STPP site selection process. Some problems in the present MCDM methods decrease the evaluation quality of STPP site selection: first, the qualitative information cannot be processed reasonably in the evaluation of the STPP site; second, it is difficult to satisfy the independent assumption of the multi-criteria decision making methods used in STPP site evaluation in fact. So this paper proposes a decision framework for evaluating and selecting optimal site for STPP. The framework involves three stages. First, potential feasible sites are identified based on energy, infrastructure, land, environmental, and social factors; second, the fuzzy measure is used to weight the important degrees of criteria to avoid the independent assumption; third, the linguistic variable instead of fuzzy set theory or numerical value reflects the experts’ intuitive preferences; fourth, a group decision making method with linguistic Choquet integral (LCI) is used to rank the alternative sites. Finally, a Chinese case study demonstrates the effectiveness of decision framework proposed in this paper.