A hybrid decision-making framework for analyzing obstacles to the development of offshore integrated energy island: an improved DEMATEL-ISM-MICMAC

Offshore integrated energy island (OIEI) becomes an important platform for exploring renewable energy in distant sea regions, but it is still in the early stages and faces many obstacles to development. The paper constructs an indicator system for factors from economic, technological, environmental and social dimensions, as well as establishes a quantitative analysis framework based on decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), interpretive structural modeling (ISM), and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) for OIEI development obstacles. Using expert evaluations as input for analysis, two rounds of consultation are conducted to mitigate decision bias, and obtain basic information to drive the obstacle analysis. To optimize the scientific of decision-making process, the paper makes improvements on the traditional DEMATEL-ISM-MICMAC: represent expert assessment through improved hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS), which characterize the hesitation and ambiguity of expert decision-making; quantify the linguistic judgements with the cloud model, avoiding the information loss in single real-number; determine the expert weight based on similarity of evaluation matrix, rather than the same weight in the traditional; classify the influence level with K-means, releasing the arbitrariness of artificially defining classification thresholds. The operability of hybrid decision-making framework is verified through case studies, and management recommendations for OIEI influence factors are proposed based on the analysis. The result shows that: 1) government policy support and proper site selection are the key root-layer factors; 2) the technical dimension exerts the greatest influence on OIEI development about 0.34, followed by the economic (0.27), social (0.21), and environmental (0.18) dimensions; 3) the framework is robust, and the scientific rigor of the decision-making process is improved compared to the traditional approach. On the whole, the paper establishes a hybrid decision-making framework for analyzing obstacles to the OIEI development, providing references for advancing OIEI and innovating engineering decision-making theory.