Multi-granular linguistic distribution evidential reasoning method for renewable energy project risk assessment

Abstract Nowadays, renewable energy projects have constantly been emphasized and the assessment of potential risks has been considered as an indispensable activity prior to implementation of projects. To carry out a reasonable assessment, multi-granular linguistic distribution assessments (LDAs), an effective and uncertainty representation tool, are adopted to express and quantify opinions based on personalized individual linguistic term sets. Specifically, this study develops a novel uncertain multiple criteria decision making approach, named multi-granular linguistic evidential reasoning method, which can handle incomplete and personalized preferences. A novel comparison method for LDAs is first put forward based on numerical characteristics, namely an expectation value and central moment. To fuse the multi-granular LDAs, a lossless transformation technique is further introduced and some of itsessential properties are discussed. Finally, a case study on renewable energy project risk assessment is discussed to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. Besides, sensitivity analysis is conducted to investigate the sequencing stability and comparative analysis is included to highlight the superiority of the proposed method.