7. Sensitivity analysis
Analyzing of the multi-criteria’ decision problems and its based frameworks may be difficult due to involvement of human subjectivity and fuzziness in data. It may distort the stability and robustness of the developed framework. Thus, it is important to check the robustness of the developed framework, so sensitivity analysis has been suggested as a suitable means for this [97]. Sensitivity analysis helps to determine the smallest change in the weights of the criteria, which may alter the existing weights of the other criteria and sub-criteria. Consequently, the final ranking may change significantly.
Among all dimensions of indicators, the “Environmental indi-cators (Env)” dimension got the maximum priority weight. By virtue of this, it is capable enough to influence the other dimensions of indicators. Given that small change in relative weights would give large changes in the final rank [98]. Considering this, we tested the final ranking through sensitivity analysis by varying the weights of environmental indicator dimension [99]. The sensitivity analysis thus may provide a further insight in the assessment of sustainability in energy planning and management. To illustrate the sensitivity analysis the effect of an incremental changeinvaluefrom0.1to0.9,tothe “Environmental indicator (Env)” dimension, was devised (please see Table 6). The results of the sensitivity analysis indicate that the maximum relative change happened in the ‘Economic’ dimension; other details are given in Table6.
Further, due to variation in indicator dimension weights, the specific indicator weights and their final ranking also changed. At