Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods in Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) : a comparison of private passenger vehicles

Analogies between the life cycle assessment (LCA) and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) methodologies have been discussed as well as LCA as an MCDA problem for resolving the trade-offs between multiple environmental objectives. The objective of this study is to compare a variety of specialised multicriteria methods and knowledge-based methods used to aggregate the results from LCA. The studies were conducted using examples of LCA on private passenger vehicles. The research used two classical methods for multicriteria decision making (AHP and TOPSIS), the method of conventional (crisp) reasoning and Mamdani’s method of fuzzy inference. The results demonstrate that among the methods analysed, only crisp reasoning does not provide satisfactory results.