Understanding Location Decisions of Energy Multinational Enterprises within the European Smart Cities’ Context: An Integrated AHP and Extended Fuzzy Linguistic TOPSIS Method

Abstract

Becoming a smart city is one of the top priorities in the urban agenda of many European cities. Among the various strategies in the transition path, local governments seek to bring innovation to their cities by encouraging multinational enterprises to deploy their green energy services and products in their municipalities. Knowing how to attract these enterprises implies that political leaders understand the multi-criteria decision problem that the energy sector enterprises face when deciding whether to expand to one city or another. To this end, the purpose of this study is to design a new manageable and controllable framework oriented to European cities’ public managers, based on the assessment of criteria and sub-criteria governing the strategic location decision made by these enterprises. A decision support framework is developed based on the AHP technique combined with an extended version of the hesitant fuzzy linguistic TOPSIS method. The main results indicate the higher relative importance of government policies, such as degree of transparency or bureaucracy level, as compared to market conditions or economic aspects of the city’s host country. These results can be great assets to current European leaders, they show the feasibility of the method and open up the possibility to replicate the proposed framework to other sectors or geographical areas.

Multi-Criteria Analysis of Smart Cities on the Example of the Polish Cities

“…MCDM techniques are considered the modern part of operations research with a multi-objective optimization problem. One of the first publications on MCDM was performed by Benjamin Franklin in his work on moral algebra [13]. Since the 1950s, MCDM has been practiced by theoretical and empirical scientists to test the capability of mathematical modeling of the decision-making approach.…”

“…The urban smartness perfo mance studies of different types include three perspectives: well-being performance, u ban security performance and carbon emission performance [23]. The urban smartnes performance studies of different objects refer to the following categories: building perfo mance [24], household performance, enterprise performance [25], national performanc [13] and regional performance [16,18]. The author conducted the literature review in the Web of Science and Elsevier databases.…”

“…Source: author's elaboration on the basis of[13,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34].…”

Perceptual Maps to Aggregate Information from Decision Makers

“…The previously described perceptual map and projected algebraic structure, will allow us to deal with MCGDM problems where each decision maker has its own qualitative reasoning approach. In this direction, an adaptation of the Fuzzy TOPSIS method was defined in [8,7] to rank different alternatives when considering a framework where DMs are allowed to use different perceptual maps.…”

“…In this paper, an extension of the study presented in [7] is conducted consedering different perceptual maps. We use the concepts defined in the previous section to design a framework for ranking criteria and sub-criteria governing the energy MNEs strategic location decisions.…”