A Fuzzy-QFD decision making approach for selecting industry energy efficiency indicators

The improvement of energy efficiency generates positive impacts on the society and environment, and to be able to have a diagnosis of energy efficiency it is necessary to use energy efficiency indicators (EEl). The use of energy management software that uses EEl can help the energy utility to improve the expansion planning of its electricity generation, transmission and distribution system. Furthermore the utility can create energy efficiency programs targeted to industry sectors where the EEl show a situation with improvement opportunities. This paper demonstrates an example through a computational simulation using the Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (FQFD) to achieve the prioritization of EEl as inputs for an energy management software development. The simulation enabled to achieve prioritization of EEl in a situation where the incoming data for QFD were introduced as linguistic variables rather than numeric variables, building up an opportunity to use a hybrid FQFD approach.