Abstract

Environmental issues, including wastewater treatment plant sitting, usually have various aspects of criteria and involve many stakeholders from various backgrounds and levels. 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 interests among them complicate the decision-making process. The Median Ranked Set sample (MRSS) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were integrated in this research to improve the decision-making process. MRSS was used to enhance the weighting process, to minimize inconsistency, uncertainty as well as conflict of interest during the stakeholder’s preferences determination, while AHP was used to determine the final priorities of the evaluation criteria. The stakeholders were divided into four groups in which four experts are in each to form 4-by-4 matrix. The results show that the environmental criteria 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 weight = 0.22). Furthermore, the best decentralized option for wastewater treatment in rural area is based on cluster level and by using the activated sludge as a wastewater treatment technology with suitability index equals to 4.26 and 4.22, respectively. While, the modified septic tank is best treatment option (with suitability index = 3.85) for wastewater treatment on household level. The introduced integrated model may offer a promising tool to improve the decision-making process and will help the environmental planners in term of uncertainty reduction and subjectivity of human judgments.

中文翻译：

---

数学中位数排序集样本和决策AHP工具的集成，以增强分散废水处理系统

摘要

环境问题（包括废水处理厂的所在地）通常具有各种标准，并且涉及来自不同背景和级别的许多利益相关者。它的特点是多准则决策问题，需要广泛的环境，财务，社会，运营和技术评估。此外，利益相关者参与的各种背景和他们之间的利益冲突使决策过程变得复杂。本研究将中位数排名集样本（MRSS）和层次分析过程（AHP）集成在一起，以改进决策过程。在利益相关者的偏好确定过程中，使用MRSS来增强权重过程，以最小化不一致，不确定性和利益冲突，而AHP用于确定评估标准的最终优先级。利益相关者分为四组，每组四位专家组成4×4矩阵。结果表明，环境准则的重要性最高，其次是社会准则和经济准则。此外，最重要的标准是流出量排放（重要性权重= 0.27），然后是公众的接受程度（重要性权重= 0.22）。此外，农村地区污水处理的最佳分散方案是基于集群水平，并采用活性污泥作为污水处理技术，其适用性指数分别为4.26和4.22。同时，改进的化粪池是家庭水平废水处理的最佳处理选择（适用性指数= 3.85）。