Dear Mahak Bhatia, Aled Williams

I have read your paper

Selection of Criteria Using MCDM Techniques - An Application in Renewable Energy

My comments are as follows:

1- Using MCDM to determine criteria, is something very useful and rarely seen in literature

2- In page 3 you say “, Europe could replace non-conventional source of energy by conventional energy”

In appears to be a mistake here because it is the opposite, that is, replacing conventional by non-conventional or renewables, unless you refer to the situation created by war, when some countries are reopening their fossil fuel plants because shortage of gas from Russia. I suggest to clarify.

3. In Figure 3 which are the units of the ordinates?

4. In page 4 “Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) is an appropriate tool in order to analyse the different criteria and alternatives defined in decision space. This is a mathematical approach that considers multiple criteria and provides a way to order them depending on their role in the decision making”

Decision space is for showing scores for alternatives in the axis, is not for ordering criteria.

5- I detected that you repeat the same thing several times.

6- In page 6, there are not preference on criteria. Their nature and number obey to the structure and demands of the scenario; they don’t depend on the DM. Don’t confuse with preference in their relative importance, where the DM may establish preferences

7- Lots of repetitions again; the paper states the same thing many times. There are many redundancies!

You use the word ‘target’ but don’t define what it is nor its function and don’t explain what some sentences mean, for instance ‘Self discharge rate’, and the same time ignore a vital criterion like ‘Capacity factor’, meaning the number of hours they can work in a day.

In page 7 “Weights is assigned to the attributes to remove the biasness in decision making and to get an optimal output”

What are attributes? You should say ‘Weights to criteria’. Attributes are the characteristics of each criterion, and reflected by its series of values. For instance, and attribute is dispersion of values.

I agree with you in your use of objective weights, but I disagree if you use subjective weights, because they can be very biased, or even designed in such a way to serve vested interests

It is quite impossible to get optimal outputs in MCDM because there could be opposite criteria like benefit and cost. You can’t optimize both at the same time

In page 7 “The weights assigned to the attributesevaluate the data on the same scale resulting in the reduction of bias”

I disagree. If the weights are subjective there have the same bias for all of them

Page 8. You repeat the same sentence that you use some line of text above. Know what I mean by repetition?

Page 9. The comparison of rankings using two or more methods only mean that they could be similar, but it does no t mean that their result is correct. It can even be that they are produced by chance.

In Figure 7 what the units in the ordinate?

In my opinion the paper is confusing, redundant and in some aspects contradictory. It appears that there is no a clear understanding of conventional sources and renewable sources.

If you want your paper published, I would suggest to have it reviewed and written in more clear English and without so many repetitions.

As a bottom line, do you think that this article fills the gap, as you say in page 3? “The purpose of the paper is to reduce the gap existing in literature by providing a set of parameters”

What you propose is done in most MCDM methods in one way or another.

I hope that my comments can help you

Nolberto Munier