Multicriterion modeling of wastewater management : a comparison of techniques

Abstract

Multicriterion modeling of wastewater management problem is presented in order to select the most preferred wastewater scheme. The Nogales International Wastewater Treatment Plant which serves the binational cities of Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora is used as case study in the modeling process. The process includes identifying of objectives, specifying of treatment alternatives and defining criteria to relate the objective satisfactum level to the alternative schemes. Six different multicriterion decision making techniques are applied to analyze and obtain preference ordering among the alternative treatment schemes. Analyses on the individual techniques and comparison among them are performed to arrive at the following conclusions: (1) all the techniques except one can be confidently used to obtain complete ordering of alternatives, (2) there is inter-model consistency in the ordering process, (3) in performing this function, the techniques are fairly robust with respect to parameter changes, and (4) only two treatment alternatives of fifteen considered are consistently ranked higher than the rest.