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Renewable energies are well-known as one of the most important energy resources not only due to limited other energy resources, but also due to environmental problems associated with air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. Renewable energy project selection is a multi actors and sophisticated problem because it is a need to incorporate social, economic, technological, and environmental considerations. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are powerful tools to evaluate and rank the alternatives among a pool of alternatives and select the best one. COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment) is an MCDM technique which determines the best alternative by calculating the ratio to the ideal solution and the negative ideal solution. On the other hand, analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is widely used in order to calculate the importance weights of evaluation criteria. In this paper an integrated COPRAS-AHP methodology is proposed to select the best renewable energy project. In order to validate the output of the proposed model, the model is compared with five MCDM tools. The results of this paper demonstrate the capability and effectiveness of the proposed model in selecting the most appropriate renewable energy option among the existing alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the balanced scorecard approach based on sustainable development parameters is a powerful and useful methodology to evaluate the sustainable performance of organization or company. In this paper, a new approach based on sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC) and multi criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches is developed for evaluating the performance of oil producing companies in Iran. For reflecting the interdependent relationships among factors influencing the problem under consideration, analytical network process (ANP), a branch of the MCDM techniques, is employed. However, using the ANP method for calculating the preference ratings of alternatives is a time-consuming and bothersome process; therefore, COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment) technique is adopted to prioritize the feasible alternatives in terms of linguistic variables. Based on this study, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The performance evaluation model proposed by using a combination of the MCDM methods and the SBSC approach helps authorities to make an attempt for achieving a competitive advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]