Social sustainability assessment of small hydropower with hesitant PROMETHEE method

Abstract Small hydropower stations in remote areas promote regional economic development and social progress. Social sustainability assessment which immensely decides the success of small hydropower development has been paid little attention currently. Meanwhile, present methods tend to fail the social sustainability assessment due to following three problems. Firstly, the uncertainty of information cannot be fully described. Secondly, the correlation among indicators lacks rationality. Thirdly, the ranking methods adopted in previous studies are not appropriate for social sustainability assessment of small hydropower. To deal with the above problems, a Preference Ranking Organization. Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) outranking method using hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) is proposed. Firstly, the HFLTS is introduced to describe the uncertainty of information. Then, the Analytical Network Process (ANP) method is adopted to measure the correlation between indicators. Moreover, the PROMETHEE method is employed to rank the social sustainability of each alternative. Then an empirical study is carried out to prove that the proposed methodology is effective and practical. Finally, public recognition is discovered as the key indicator by comparative analysis and discussion. This study provides an innovative perspective for the social sustainability assessment of small hydropower and contributes to making more rational and scientific decisions.

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