Energy Reports (Nov 2022)
Prioritizing strategic innovative energy technologies for development by a novel fuzzy approach based on distances from ideals (Case study: Upstream technologies of Iran’s oil industry fields)
Abstract
Previous empirical research about the functions of innovative systems has been less enabled to present practical strategies for managers’ decisions. This paper aims to determine the boundaries of the innovation system in the oil industry by prioritizing strategic innovative upstream technologies for policy-making and commercializing within the framework of energy technological innovation systems. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy approach based on distance from ideals to scrutinize the effects of effective criteria on the policy-making process and rank new and essential technologies in various fields. The developed fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is applied to select the best strategic innovation technology. Due to the importance of selecting the best technology, several decision-makers (DMs) who are expert in their areas are applied. To increase the accuracy of the results, a new subjective and objective approach is proposed to calculate the weight of DMs. Moreover, a novel method based on the distances from ideals and according to DMs’ opinions in the decision-making process is introduced to determine their objective weights. One of the advantages of this subjective and objective weighting approach is considering both DMs’ resume and opinions in the decision-making process. It should be noted that due to the management of real-world uncertainty as well as increasing the accuracy of results in applying DMs’ opinions, trapezoidal fuzzy sets are used in all stages of computation. A case study about upstream technologies of Iran’s oil industry is introduced and solved. To demonstrate the accuracy of the results and review the advantages of the presented approach, a comparative analysis with a recent literature study is performed. Indeed, selecting the best strategic innovative upstream technology of the oil industry in each field namely materials, services, and equipment for development is the main result of this study.
