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Abstract Energy efficiency improvement is a crucial issue in a world that suffers from threats of escalated depletion of energy nonrenewable resources. In the highly intensive energy consuming industries such as petrochemical industries, more realistic modeling of energy efficiency is of a paramount importance. Building such models and thereby indicators for energy efficiency enables concerned firms to work out their plans for continuous improvement of the efficiency of energy utilization. In the presented work, a methodology, based on the concept of intrinsic energy, is proposed for evaluation of energy efficiency. For heavy industries, characterized by continuous production processes of different product mix, the energy efficiencies associated with production of each product are further considered as inputs for a newly developed model to decide a product mix that maximizes the energy efficiency in industrial application. The developed model for product mix optimization gave a room for decision makers to consider both energy efficiency and economic added-value with a weighing possibility that can be controlled based on organization’s goals and strategies. The energy efficiency improvement opportunities prioritization is a multi criteria decision making problem. Hence, the merging of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and value-focused thinking was proposed to develop a methodology for decision support suitable for such prioritization. For the purpose of validation of the proposed methodologies, a case study in petrochemical industry is introduced. |