A group decision-making method to measure national energy architecture performance: A case study of the International energy Agency

The World Economic Forum has developed the Energy Architecture Performance Index (EAPI) to help nations or regions gain insights into the status of energy systems, with the goal of Steering energy systems to be more affordable, sustainable, and secure. The EAPI is the arithmetic mean of energy triangle: economic growth and development (EGD), environmental sustainability (ES), and energy access and security (EAS). However, the preference diversity among EGD, ES and EAS of energy analysts or decision-makers has been largely unexplored. This study, based on the EAPI framework, proposes a group decision-making (GDM) method with preference analysis to measure national energy architecture performance. Specifically, an initial group decision matrix is firstly developed in terms of identifying the importance orders of energy triangle as individual decision makers; then the preference diversities of decision-makers are extensively investigated from the three aspects of psychological preferences, preferential differences, preferential priorities to construct a revised group decision-making matrix; the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) is ultimately employed to calculate and compare the national energy architecture performance. A case study using the data of the International Energy Agency (IEA) is conducted to validate the proposed method, in which the satisfaction levels and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients analysis are carried out to demonstrate the merits of our method.