Multi attributes decision making in ranking of biomass energy resource

Biomass is a sustainable and clean energy. The use of biomass resources for power generation offers numerous advantages such as rural development. Biomass differs from other alternative energy sources because biomass has many resources with a lot of variety, and it can be converted to energy through many conversion processes. In spite of availability of biomass resource in Iran, producing biomass energy has not been considered well enough in Iran. In this study we select the best biomass resource in Iran among agricultural residues, animal waste and industrial and municipal waste water through MCDM methods. For the selection of the best biomass resource this study combines social, technical, environmental and economic aspects using analytic hierarchy process method for weighting the importance of the different criteria. In the second phase, the PROMETHEE II method is used to compare alternatives which introduces the multi-criteria outranking index based on the outranking flow and it can be applied in the selection of a Renewable Energy project