USING DS-AHP MODEL TO EVALUATE OCEANOGRAPHIC INFORMATION AS A CO-BENEFIT OF MARINE RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECTS

Low stakeholder acceptance has been identified as a major sustainability issue for Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) projects in Japan due to the conflicting interests of the existing marine industries. Technology implementation... [ view full abstract ]

Low stakeholder acceptance has been identified as a major sustainability issue for Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) projects in Japan due to the conflicting interests of the existing marine industries. Technology implementation without framing the related socio-economic complexities have been proven to be unsustainable from the previous coastal and offshore development projects in Japan. Since MRE is relatively a new industry in Japan, stakeholders still have a vague perception regarding its impacts. Project developers and the policy makers are searching for ways to minimize the conflicts between the MRE and traditional marine industries. Creating synergies among stakeholders is a well-recognized strategy to improve the stakeholder acceptance. A similar strategy has been proposed in the case of Japan’s MRE projects which is “Sharing oceanographic information obtained by the Condition Monitoring System (CMS) of the MRE project to other stakeholders”. However, the evaluation of this strategy has not been done up to now due to the data limitations, uncertainties and poor stakeholder knowledge.

In this research, we present DS-AHP model, a hybrid approach based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) to evaluate the proposed oceanographic information sharing scheme. DS-AHP model improves the objective decision making process amidst significant information incompleteness and uncertainties which are the major limitations of standard AHP. DS-AHP method gives the decision maker a greater level of control in judging the level of preference for decision alternative(s) amidst limited existing knowledge.  

This research comprises multiple steps to evaluate the proposed co-benefit sharing strategy, where the Japan’s Ocean Current Power project was used as the case study. In the first step, stakeholder interactions were done to identify the most prominent decision alternatives and decision criteria while gathering the technical, economic feasibility information for each alternatives. “Fishermen”, “Fishery Union”, “Researchers” and “Project Developers” have been selected as the main stakeholders. “Focus Group Discussions” and “Interviews” have been used for the data collection. “Monetary cost-benefits”, “Improvements to the ocean observations” and “Stakeholder engagement” were used as decision criteria. “Sharing information obtained by the CMS of the power plant”, “No information sharing”, “Sharing all information required by the stakeholders” have been considered as the decision alternatives.

In the second step, standard AHP method was used to assign a weight to the criteria. Then the stakeholder preference of each decision alternative was collected with respect to each criteria. The criteria-wise alternative preferences were then combined using DST to generate the stakeholder-wise belief and plausibility levels of each alternatives. Same method was used to combine stakeholder-wise decisions to generate the group decision.

Technical and economic feasibility, potential of the proposed system to reduce the existing information gap were proven in the initial evaluation. The final results of the DS-AHP model, indicates the option of "sharing oceanographic information obtained to operate the power plant by the basic CMS” as the most preferred alternative. In addition, a new software tool was developed to support the DS-AHP process where lack of tool is a major limitation of using this method in real-world applications.