Multi-criteria group decision-making based sustainability measurement of wastewater treatment processes

A Group Decision-Making Model for Wastewater Treatment Plans Selection Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets

“…Wibowo and Grandhi (2015) used intuitionistic fuzzy sets to select and evaluate a suitable wastewater treatment technology. Ren and Liang (2017) proposed to develop an intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) with group multi-attribute decision analysis (MADA) to determine sustainability sequences of different wastewater treatment processes. A group decision model with an unbalanced linguistic ordered weighted average (IULOWA) operator was established based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) (Marin, Valls, Isern, Moreno, & Merigó, 2014).…”

Multiactor multicriteria decision making for life cycle sustainability assessment under uncertainties

“…The opinions and preferences of different stakeholders rather than that of a special group of stakeholders have been incorporated in the decision‐making process, and the sustainability order of industrial systems determined by the proposed method are based on democratic decision‐making; Data uncertainties are considered when selecting the most sustainable industrial system rather than assuming that all the data for sustainability assessment are fixed crisp numbers. In other words, the uncertainty factors can be incorporated in the prioritization of industrial systems according to their integrated sustainability performances.Besides the advantages, there are also some limitations and challenges when using the developed framework for selecting the most sustainable industrial system among multiple alternatives: The difficulty in data collection: it is usually difficult or impossible to simultaneously obtain the data about the life cycle economic, environmental, and social performances of the emerging technologies; The lack of considering the interdependences and interactions among the criteria for sustainability assessment: all the criteria for sustainability assessment of industrial systems are assumed to be independent, but this assumption does not match with the actual conditions, because there are usually various interdependences and interactions among the criteria for sustainability assessment; The lack of the ability to address the decision‐making matrix with hybrid types of numbers: as mentioned‐above, it is usually difficult or impossible to obtain the data for decision‐making, and some other types of numbers (i.e., fuzzy numbers and grey numbers) are also widely used for rating the industrial systems in terms of their performances on some criteria for sustainability assessment, but the proposed method in this study cannot deal with the decision‐making matrix with hybrid types of numbers; The loss of useful information when using the interval numbers for representing data uncertainties: the users using the interval numbers to address data uncertainties do not need to know the mechanisms of data variations in industrial systems, but some useful information of the mechanism cannot be effectively used.…”

Multi-Criteria Analysis of Pollution Caused by Auto Traffic in a Geographical Area Limited to Applicability for an Eco-Economy Environment

“…Ten criteria in environment, economy, society-politic, and technology dimensions were employed to achieve sustainability measurement (SM) of WT processes. The multi-criteria sustainability assessment method allow different experts to attend the SM, and enable the participants to employ the natural language/words to depict their intuitionistic opinions [6].…”