Abstract
In transitioning towards cleaner production and any other new policy, public acceptance is often seen as a major issue. Edutainment energy parks, with the potential to produce and exhibit various renewable energies, seems to be a successful strategy for increasing public awareness and culture building that may lead to public acceptance. The location of these parks is the first, and perhaps the most important, challenge impacting their future usage and success. In this study, a hybrid decision support model was developed by combining the Delphi method (to obtain the main site selection criteria), the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory technique (to establish the interdependence and correlation between complex criteria), and the Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (to overcome inconsistent and uncertain judgments whilst weighting the selected criteria). The developed method identified twelve sub-criteria grouped under four main criteria, including transportation infrastructures, population and social, environmental, and physical indicators. The weighting results showed that the built environment and natural topography (0.148), parcel size, land use and economic matters (0.146), legibility (0.107), and population centers (0.104) are the four most important sub-criteria. Application to a real data set of Tehran for efficiency revealed that Afra Park with a 5419 m2 area is the most optimal parcel for establishing an edutainment energy park in District 7 of the city, according to the selected criteria. Therefore, implementing these criteria demonstrated that they can be useful when working on a practical project with real data.
•Hybrid expert knowledge modelling was proposed to tackle an edutainment energy park siting.•The Delphi, DEMATEL, and FANP techniques were integrated to select and weight the criteria.•Siting criteria were classified into transportation, social, environmental, and physical groups.•Site suitability was calculated by combination of 12 weighted criteria (e.g. landuse).•This novel hybrid technique was successfully tested on a district zone in Tehran, Iran.