Partner selection for state-owned power grid enterprises in China based on an extended TODIM method: A case study in Inner Mongolia

Abstract

With the implementation of the electric power reform in China, an increasing number of state-owned power grid enterprises are encouraged to introduce social capital and develop mixed ownership in some businesses and therefore selecting suitable partners becomes a pressing issue. This study proposes an extended TODIM method to deal with the partner selection problem for state-owned power grid enterprises in the process of developing mixed ownership. First, 14 criteria are identified by Delphi method and classified into three categories including enterprise capacities, compatibility and risks. Then, specific decision-making steps of the proposed method are presented and in this method, intuitionistic fuzzy theory is introduced to handle the linguistic evaluation information and entropy weight method is applied to obtain the criteria weights. Next, the proposed method is implemented in a case study where Inner Mongolia Power Company plans to select the best new energy partner from four candidates. Finally, the influence of different attenuation factor of losses is discussed and a comparison analysis of different methods is performed to illustrate the robustness of the decision-making result and the feasibility of the proposed method.