Decision Support System for Sustainability Assessment of Power Generation Technologies - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 530

Identifying Values and Weights of the Criteria. The results of the expert assessment were used
to determine the weights of criteria defining the objects in question, and to arrange the
weighted criteria in the order of their priority. Selected groups of experts took the job to
determine the values and to list the criteria in line with the priorities selected by the experts.
When the weights and the priorities of the criteria were clear, it was time to determine the
key environmental factors that affect technological facilities of energy production. The
research included a total of 29 criteria assessed by six groups of experts. The reliability was
ensured by assessing the agreement between expert opinions with the help of the Kendall's
coefficient of concordance. The value of the coefficient of concordance W is 0.29, which is
above zero and thus ensures sufficient reliability of criteria weights obtained by the outranking
method. The result, however, shows low degree of agreement between expert opinions. It is
only natural when the experts selected for such expert assessment have different attitudes
towards the environment that affects this industry. Moreover, 29 criteria selected for our
research make it more complex and the deviation of expert opinions is more likely. To make
the research more reliable, it is possible to determine criteria weights for each subsystem of the
analysed environment—macro, meso and microenvironment—separately. This would make
the research simpler for experts. Expert assessments are stochastic: changes in the composition
of the groups would also change the assessments of the indicators, which determine the
coefficient of concordance (Podvezko, 2005).The ranking of the key criteria obtained after the
expert assessment is shown in Table 2.

Criterion

x i Weight

24 Experience of CEOs 0.061

14 Profitability 0.055

25 Supply of skilled professionals 0.053

27 Readiness to choose and introduce innovations 0.052

1 EU regulation of activities related to electric power supply 0.049

10 Environmental regulation 0.049

6 Investment conditions 0.047

Table 2. Criteria line-up by weight after the expert assessment
The results of expert examination suggest that experts consider the experience of CEOs,
profitability, supply of skilled professionals, and readiness to introduce innovations as
important factors for different technological facilities of energy production. The experts
believe that environmental regulation, technological shift, and corporate social
responsibility are also of importance. The latter criterion was ranked 12 th of 29. It shows
that both employees who were members of the groups of experts and other experts from
energy companies expect responsibility when it comes to activities, to handling of
environmental issues, and to the response to public needs. Such criteria as competitive
environment and relations with authorities received low weights. This is because
technological facilities of energy production are currently monopolies in the energy
sector, the companies that could compete do not yet have favourable conditions to enter
the market.