Identify improvement projects in the field of energy management in the hospital and prioritize them using fuzzy AHP

Since, energy consumption per square meter in hospitals is much higher than that of other types of service institutions, in this study, effort was made to define and prioritize energy consumption improvement projects in hospitals in order to take measures and optimize its.
The necessity of optimizing energy consumption in hospitals according to some scales including the average consumption and cost of water, electricity and gas for bed days and active bed were described, and calculated in the case. Then, improvement actions were identified using energy audit, interviews with hospital experts and conducted studies in hospitals. Also, projects with high importance were extracted regarding to impact on energy consumption indexes, expert opinion, aggregation, feasibility, and limitations such as prerequisite, synchronicity and post-requisite. Finally, specific criteria were identified in three dimensions, i.e., factors affecting the level of energy consumption, trying to execute project and risk and the projects were prioritized using questionnaire and FAHP.
The results showed that energy consumption in the studied hospital was higher than the world standards, this confirmed the necessity of optimizing energy consumption and using energy management systems. The results of prioritization also showed the first four priorities.
It seem necessary to use methods for saving energy consumption through the implementation of improvement projects in the hospitals. As the large number of such projects, as well as limited financial and capital resources, proposed method can be used by hospitals to select improvement projects with low risk and payback period.