Evaluating challenges of circular economy and Internet of Things in renewable energy supply chain through a hybrid decision-making framework.

Due to industrial development, expansion of communities, and attention to sustainable development, sustainable energy supply has become a big challenge for communities. In this regard, the development and use of Renewable Energy (RE) are considered due to reducing the harmful environmental effects of fossil fuels. Improving the efficiency of the Renewable Energy Supply Chain (RESC) is important for using RE. To improve the performance and efficiency of RESC, it is necessary to use emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and its integration with the principles of the Circular Economy (CE). Therefore, this study proposes integrating IoT and CE for sustainable development and resource management in RESC. Also, this research provides a hybrid decision framework to assess the challenges of IoT and CE in the RESC of Iran. The CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) technique is used to specify the importance of the criteria. The Fuzzy Evaluation Based on Distance from Average Solution (FEDAS) technique ranks the challenges. The findings indicated that considering the cost of investment, the rate of return on investment, and the productivity rate were the most important sub-criteria with values of 0.149, 0.129, and 0.106 respectively. Then, the sensitivity of the results is examined and the validation of the findings is analyzed with decision-making methods. The results indicate the high priority of the challenge related to transparency in the implementation procedures of IoT and RE projects and information dissemination protocols, the development of guidelines for the integration of IoT in other systems in the information network, and the amount of investment and lack of access to financial resources. This study provided practical insights for RE development based on IoT and CE capabilities for energy planning.

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Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.