Application of Integrated Median Ranked Set Sample and Analytic Hierarchy Process to Enhance Decision Making Process in Environmental Issues-Selecting Best Wastewater Collection as a Case Study

Abstract

Environmental issues usually have various aspects; criteria and it involves many stakeholders from various backgrounds and level. It is characterized as multi-criteria decision-making problem that requires extensive environmental, financial, social, operational and technical evaluations. Furthermore, the various background of involved stakeholders and conflict of interest complicate the decision-making process. The Median Ranked Set sample (MRSS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were integrated in this research. MRSS was used to enhance the weighting process and to minimize inconsistency and conflict of interest during the stakeholder’s involvement. The stakeholders were divided into four groups in which four experts to form 4-by-4 matrix. The environment got the highest importance followed by social and economic criteria, respectively. Furthermore, the most important criteria are outflow emissions (importance weight = 0.27) followed by public acceptance (importance = 0.22). The introduced integrated model may offer a promising tool to improve the decision-making process and help the environmental planners in term of reduction uncertainty and subjectivity of human judgments.