Authors: Qianyun Wen, Qiyao Yan, Junjie Qu and Yang Liu.
Publication date: 2021

Heating systems vary in energy source, heating technology, and equipment location. These complexities make it challenging for households to compare heating systems and make decisions. Hence, a decision support tool that provides a generalized ranking of individual heating alternatives is proposed for households as decision makers to identify the optimal choice.

This paper presents an analysis of 13 heating alternatives and 19 quantitative criteria in technological, environmental, and financial aspects, combines ideal solution-based multi-criteria decision making with 6 weighting methods and 4 normalization methods and introduces ensemble learning with a fuzzy membership function derived from Cauchy distribution to finalize the ultimate ranking.