ارزیابی ریسک پروژه های مشارکت دولتی و خصوصی زیرساخت تامین برق خودرو در چین با استفاده از TOPSIS فازی Risk evaluation of electric vehicle charging infrastructure public-private partnership projects in China using fuzzy TOPSIS

1 Introduction As global sustainable development, energy saving and emission reduction have become necessary and urgent issues. Electric vehicles (EVs), which play a key role in strategic development plans as a promising technology to promote environmental quality, livability, and sustainability without significantly reducing convenience or mobility (Stark Juliane et al., 2018; White and Sintov, 2017), has been given more attention for its outstanding performance in carbon emission reduction (Zhang and Han, 2017) and environment protection. Since transport sector has been one of the top contributors in greenhouse gas emissions (He and Zhan, 2018; S. Wang et al., 2017), significant efforts and series of measurements have been taken to satisfy China’s sustainable development requirements. As a result, China has become the world’s largest electric vehicle market and continues to maintain a high-speed growth (Lin and Wu, 2018) and its sales totaled 777,000 in 2017. Despite the EV development scale, it is noteworthy that demand-supply imbalance in electric vehicle charging infrastructure (EVCI) has become the major obstacle of EV development in China. To satisfy increasingly urgent charging demand, public-private partnership (PPP) mode has been introduced and supported to attract private sectors and make use of their advantages in financing, design, construction and operation for providing high quality, efficient and diverse charging services and creating social benefit (Ou, 2016). PPP projects are always characterized by long construction period, large scale investment, complicated contract structure and various uncertain risk factors in the whole life-cycle of project construction, which arouse a fundamental concern in view of challenges from perspective of private sector, risk evaluation of a PPP project becomes increasingly important and necessary. However, research investigating the risk evaluation of EVCI PPP project is limited and China lacks certain experience in this field. It is therefore important to understand what risk factors might influence the projects and propose a method to evaluate the risk level of a potential project to ensure the continuous success.