Assessment of alternative fuels for transportation using a hybrid graph theory and analytic hierarchy process method

The release of large amounts of greenhouse gases due to fossil fuel combustion contributes to global warming causing a serious environmental problem. The transportation technologies based on cleaner and renewable alternative fuels can play a major role in mitigating the green house effect and improving the urban air quality. In the present work, a hybrid multicriteria methodology is developed using graph theory and analytic hierarchy process methods for the performance assessment of conventional and non-conventional transportation fuels on the basis of multiple criteria. The proposed fuel suitability digraph presents a graphical visualization of alternative fuel selection attributes and their interrelations. The fuel preference index obtained from matrix permanent function provides a total objective value for comparison of alternative fuel options. Analytic hierarchy process is employed to assign the relative weights to the fuel selection attributes. Three examples are considered in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed methodology. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.