Search results for "decision analysis"

Assessment of Ecological Risks at Former Landfill Site Using TRIAD Procedure and Multicriteria Analysis

2012

Old industrial landfills are important sources of environmental contamination in Europe, including Finland. In this study, we demonstrated the combination of TRIAD procedure, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), and statistical Monte Carlo analysis for assessing the risks to terrestrial biota in a former landfill site contaminated by petroleum hydrocarbons (PHCs) and metals. First, we generated hazard quotients by dividing the concentrations of metals and PHCs in soil by the corresponding risk-based ecological benchmarks. Then we conducted ecotoxicity tests using five plant species, earthworms, and potworms, and determined the abundance and diversity of soil invertebrates from additional…

A composite indicator index as a proxy for measuring the quality of water supply as perceived by users for urban water services

2021

Abstract The objective of this study is to develop a composite indicator (CI) to measure the quality of water supply based on the variables that are considered to affect users’ perceptions of water supply quality. The proposed CI includes six relevant aspects that determine users’ perceptions of water supply quality (network quality, water quality, water price, complaints, inconvenience caused by upgrading the network, and continuity of service) in a simple, economical, and objective way, using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) with weights based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). The CI was applied to 32 municipalities in the metropolitan area of Valencia (Spain). The results show t…

An ex post criticism, based on stakeholders’ preferences, of a residential sector’s energy master plan: the case study of the Sicilian region

2016

Energy master plans are important tools for an effective and sustainable land governance. On the other hand, the stakeholder role in setting priorities for planning energy interventions is dramatically increasing, also in the light of recently issued European directives. The priorities of energy-saving measures of the Sicilian energy and environmental master plan were originally established with the application of typical economic indicators (the cost of saved energy and the cost of avoided pollutant emissions). During the prioritization process, there was a minor contribution from stakeholders who were not directly involved in the priority-setting process but were only asked to express the…

Ranking World Tourism Competitiveness: A Comparison of Two Composite Indicators

2021

Assessing travel and tourism competitiveness (T&TC) is becoming an issue of paramount importance for stakeholders, mainly policymakers and practitioners. The availability of new databases such as the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report from the World Economic Forum (WEF) has boosted this interest. This chapter contributes to the current literature in this field with an assessment of the T&TC of 136 world tourist destinations. In doing so, two well-known approaches are employed: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with endogenous common weights, and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions (TOPSIS). World tourist destinations are ranked using these approaches,…

2021

Sustainable forest management plays a key role for forest biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services (BES), including the important service of carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation. Forest managers, however, find themselves in the increasingly complex planning situation to balance the often conflicting demands in BES. To cope with this situation, a prototype of a decision support system (DSS) for strategic (long-term) planning at the forest enterprise level was developed in the present project. The DSS was applied at three case study enterprises (CSEs) in Northern Switzerland, two lowland and one higher-elevation enterprise, for a 50-year time horizon (2010 to 2060…

Project Selection by Constrained Fuzzy AHP

2004

The selection of a project among a set of possible alternatives is a difficult task decision makers have to face. Difficulties in selecting a project arise because of the different goals involved and because of the large number of attributes to consider. Our approach is based upon a fuzzy extension of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This paper focuses on the constraints that have to be considered within fuzzy AHP in order to take in account all the available information. This study demonstrates that by considering all the information deriving from the constraints better results in terms of certainty and reliability can be achieved.

Complementary Judgment Matrix Method with Imprecise Information for Multicriteria Decision-Making

2018

The complementary judgment matrix (CJM) method is an MCDA (multicriteria decision aiding) method based on pairwise comparisons. As in AHP, the decision-maker (DM) can specify his/her preferences using pairwise comparisons, both between different criteria and between different alternatives with respect to each criterion. The DM specifies his/her preferences by allocating two nonnegative comparison values so that their sum is 1. We measure and pinpoint possible inconsistency by inconsistency errors. We also compare the consistency of CJM and AHP trough simulation. Because preference judgments are always more or less imprecise or uncertain, we introduce a way to represent the uncertainty throu…

SUP R DSS: A sustainability-based decision support & system for road pavements

2019

Road pavement community members are increasingly becoming aware of the need to incorporating the principles of sustainable development into the sector. Policies are also going in this direction and as a consequence in the recent years researchers and practitioners are coming up with new materials, technologies and practices designed to reduce the negative impacts of their activities in the surroundings. Within this framework the road pavements sector is witnessing a paradigm shift towards the development of pavement technologies incorporating high-content of recycled materials, as well as best practices to decrease the overall carbon footprint. These are all promising solutions that to the …

An AHP-based evaluation procedure for Innovative Educational Projects: A face-to-face vs. computer-mediated case study

2008

In this paper a procedure to evaluate proposals for Educational Innovation Projects is proposed. This methodology should help the Institute of Educational Sciences of the Politechnical University of Valencia to choose the best Educational Project, the final aim being to provide the Administration with a stringent evaluation methodology, since the current evaluation methodology was found to be neither sufficiently objective nor systematic. Since in the definition and evaluation of these Educational Projects diverse stakeholders are involved, the process has been approached as a MCDA carried out by a group of experts. Although a whole methodology is proposed, the paper has been focused on the…

Software Modernization Decision Criteria: An Empirical Study

2005

Decisions regarding software evolution strategies such as modernizations are economically important. We present results of our empirical study of the views of decision makers. We have asked their views of the relative importance of 49 software modernization decision criteria. We have gathered data from Finnish software industry. There were 26 experts from 8 organizations involved. They were mainly upper or middle level managers. Our study shows that there is a large set of criteria which should be taken into account, and that those studied by us provide a good coverage of the relevant ones. We list the top-20 criteria. We also performed a cluster analysis which produced two groups of subjec…