Six heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) schemes, constant air volume, variable air volume, fan-coil, induction unit, variable refrigerant volume and distributed HVAC system are evaluated and compared in multi-criteria. Because of the uncertainty of qualitative criteria, this paper presents a fuzzy multi-criteria model to select the optimal HVAC system. The methods of fuzzy set theory, linguistic value, analytic hierarchy process, entropy weighting and optimal weighting are used to obtain the criteria weights. Fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is employed to get the ranking of HVAC schemes. Finally, the application of the fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation model demonstrates detailedly the computation and evaluation procedure in the selection of HVAC schemes.
Practical applications: The fuzzy multi-criteria evaluation model combined with the optimal weighting method in this paper is believed by the authors to contribute to the selection and comparison of HVAC systems or schemes in the building. It is proposed that both qualitative and quantitative criteria existing in reality are used to evaluate HVAC schemes and the decision-making method combines both subjectivity and objectivity. In addition, simple and practical computation and evaluation procedure is easily applied by HVAC designers or decision-makers. Such an approach could become a powerful tool to make an optimal selection for HVAC schemes.
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