The city of Loviisa in Finland is planning a new sustainable residential area with a total of 240,000 m(2) of residential houses and apartment buildings with services. The city wants to promote sustainable energy solutions in the area, considering various renewable energy forms for heating. The aim of this research is to evaluate which heating system would be best for a new single-family house when different technical, economic, environmental and usability criteria are considered. A group of experts evaluated the alternative heating systems with respect to the criteria. The citizens were involved with a questionnaire to provide preference information for different criteria. Altogether 11 alternative heating systems were evaluated in terms of 15 criteria. The Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) method was used to analyze this problem. The SMAA method was extended to handle a hierarchy of criteria and sub-criteria. The problem was analyzed in two phases based on expert evaluation for the criteria measurements first without the preference information from citizens and after this with the information. The results show that district heating produced by biomass based CHP is the most widely acceptable heating alternative followed by ground source heat pump both without and with preference information. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.