APOLLO-Live: A multi-criteria-based webtool for synchronous group decision making and consensus support in energy and...

Pursuing a just, equitable, and desirable sustainable transition requires stakeholders from a diverse set of backgrounds and varying viewpoints to actively engage in deliberations to co-design their future. Facilitating stakeholder engagement activities has so far relied on either qualitative frameworks and processes or simplified quantitative approaches such as surveys, which render eliciting tangible and actionable outcomes challenging. Although group decision making and consensus reaching can leverage the capacity of multi-criteria decision aid to address this gap, tools implementing such processes remain scarce. Here, we present APOLLO-Live, a stakeholder engagement webtool that can be used live in workshops to facilitate deliberations in energy and climate policy. The tool relies on linguistic variables, which are easily comprehensible by the participants, and employs the 2-tuple TOPSIS group decision making method to prioritise needs faced by different communities, as well as solutions that can be implemented to advance the energy transition. It also fleshes out differences in the voting patterns of different groups of voters and calculates a consensus metric to shed light on conflicts arising. Through tips and suggestions provided within the tool and based on multiple rounds of voting, supplemented by live discussions during the workshop, the tool can improve consensus and synthesise multiple perspectives in the produced outcomes, assisting towards bridging the conflicts and producing solutions that are widely accepted. We highlight the functionalities of the webtool, including how it can be used to advance stakeholder dialogues, in two pilot use cases targeting the preferences of the youth in terms of (a) actions to advance climate action and (b) investments to be prioritised. Finally, although the development and use principles followed focused on the energy and climate policy domain, the tool can be used in any application where multi-criteria decision aid and group decision making can potentially be employed.