Global human pollutant activities have raised greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which have directly affected the climate. Fossil fuel-based energy has brought a negative impact on the environment and is considered one of the largest sources of GHG emissions. It is envisaged that GHG emissions will increase in the future due to rapid population growth and industrialization. Thus, it is imperative to mitigate climate variability and reduce GHGs by adopting renewable energy (RE) sources for electricity generation. In this regard, the multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) process would serve the purpose of framing out energy policy to analyze these environmentally friendly energy sources. This study uses an integrated decision methodology—a combination of Delphi, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP), and the fuzzy weighted aggregated sum product assessment (FWASPAS)—for the adoption of RE sources for electricity generation in Turkey. Initially, the study identified five main criteria and seventeen sub-criteria using the Delphi method. Then, the FAHP method was used to evaluate and rank the main criteria and sub-criteria. Finally, the FWASPAS method was used to assess and prioritize five major RE sources for electricity generation. The FAHP analysis indicated that political criteria are the most influential, followed by economic and technical criteria. Further, the FWASPAS method revealed that wind energy is the most significant option for electricity generation. This decision-making process can help the energy planners to utilize RE sources for sustainable development.

With the advances in smart sensing and data mining technologies of Industry 4.0, condition monitoring of key equipment in manufacturing has brought transformations in production and maintenance management. However, in practical applications, noise from both the working environment and the sensing devices is inevitable, which causes the low performance of data-driven fault diagnosis. To address this challenge, the paper develops a robust two-stage joint denoising method by integrating ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) and independent component analysis (ICA), with fuzzy entropy discriminant as a threshold. The developed method can filter noisy components from decomposed modal components and reconstruct a new signal with denoised independent components. Moreover, an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) model based on the VGG structure has been constructed as a classifier to achieve end-to-end fault diagnosis. The experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy and superior anti-interference capability of the proposed method for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under various noise levels. Compared with state-of-the-art denoising methods and fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method achieves higher accuracy and robustness under variable noise interference. The proposed method can be applied to broader fault diagnosis tasks of production equipment in complex practical environments.

With the advances in Internet-of-Things and data mining technologies, deep learning-based approaches have been widely used for intelligent fault diagnosis of manufacturing assets. However, uncertainty caused by the non-stationary process data such as vibration signal and noise interference in practical working environments will greatly affect the performance and reliability of predictions. The present paper develops a trustworthy and intelligent fault diagnosis framework based on a two-stage joint denoising method and evidential neural networks. The proposed denoising method integrating the improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) and the independent component analysis (ICA) method can effectively reduce data uncertainty caused by noise interference. The stacked gated recurrent unit (SGRU) model has been incorporated into the evidential neural networks as a deep classifier. The proposed evidential SGRU (ESGRU) method can quantify the prediction uncertainty, which estimates the prediction trustworthiness. Predictive entropy and reliability diagrams are used as calibration methods to validate the effectiveness of uncertainty estimation. The proposed framework is validated by two case studies of rolling bearing fault diagnosis in variable noise conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a high denoising effect and provide reliable uncertainty prediction results which are significant for practical applications.