| In this study, a multi-criteria decision-support system for municipal solid waste management is constructed to provide decision makers with an automated tool to perform impact evaluation according to several criteria. This system is initially designed for a landfill selection problem in the city of Regina, but can also be used to deal with other decision problems. Five commonly used multi-attribute decision making (MADM) methods are implemented in this system for impact evaluation, including: (1) Simple Weighted Addition method; (2) Weighted Product method; (3) Cooperative Game Theory; (4) TOPSIS; (5) ELECTRE with complementary analysis. Given a set of possible alternatives and criteria, these MADM methods will help to rank the alternatives based on decision makers' preferences. Since different MADM methods might result in different ranking orders, a set of aggregation methods needs to be used for further analysis.; To perform an impact evaluation for landfill selection in the City of Regina, two problems are commonly encountered as follows: (1) The acquired information contains uncertainties where data obtained for the site evaluation are mostly descriptive, and not in a numerical format. (2) Public and political concerns are subjective factors and usually not considered in environmental impact evaluation; however, they have great influence on the siting of a new landfill. These two problems make the evaluation process difficult. In order to compare the alternatives under different impacts and to find the most preferable site, multi-criteria decision support system is used in this study to help decision makers or interest groups gain more insight into the problem. The result is found to be satisfactory and consistent with the interested parties' preferences. |
