Performance Indicators Framework for Assessment of a Sanitary Sewer System Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Abstract

In this study, performance indicators (PIs) for assessing services of the sanitary sewer system in South Korea were evaluated based on general opinions collected from experts in the field. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was then carried out. The evaluated set of PIs consisted of five major criteria: management, operation and maintenance, service, environment, and finance. Using the experts’ survey incorporated into the AHP tool, the prioritization of the five criteria was performed, consisting of a total of 14 indicators and 34 checklists on three levels. Of the criteria groups, operation and maintenance was found to be the most important indicator, comprising 43% of all the scores. The AHP results showed that, of the 34 checklists, 13 indicators were explained as candidates of key PIs: on-the-job training and work role and responsibility from management, sewer condition inspection, pump, sewer maintenance, flow rate/water quality/odor monitoring from operation and maintenance, complaint resolution from service, inflow volume from environment, and operational cost in annual expenditures from finance. The PIs developed in this study are expected to be used by stakeholders involved in the provision of sewer services, such as undertaking companies, policy-making bodies, and financing agencies.

Sanitation Criteria: A Comprehensive Review of Existing Sustainability and Resilience Evaluation Criteria for Sanitation Systems

“…Only 11 articles articulated requirements about the quality of an indicator, for example, stating that each indicator needed to be SMART (e.g., specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound) . While most of those articles did not use the SMART terminology, they had similar requirements of representative or relevant, ,,,− conceptually sound or scientific, , understandable or transparent, , clear and unambiguous, ,,, quantifiable, ,,,, and measurable based on data availability. ,, Whether an indicator meets a specific set of requirements, though, can be context specific (i.e., the same indicator could be SMART in one context but not in another). , Since so few articles discussed requirements for indicator quality, the associated metrics and applications of each article’s listed indicators were reviewed.…”

Application of AHP for the Weighting of Sustainable Development Indicators at the Subnational Level

“…Likewise, the use of AHP for the indicator weighting in inter-thematic frameworks is justified because it helps to analyze transversely the dimensions forming sustainable development (Gan et al 2017). Moreover, the AHP method is one of the most popular multiple-criteria decision-making approaches and is used to prioritize or determine the weights of several factors and sub-factors, considering multiple criteria and multiple stakeholder groups for problems of complex scenarios, and capturing subjective and objective evaluation measures that are easy to use and are scalable (Ghorbanzadeh et al 2019;Nam et al 2019;Zhang et al 2019).…”

Managing sewerage networks using both failure modes, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods

“…However, the AHP also has several weaknesses, including problems due to the interdependence between the criteria and alternatives, inconsistencies between judgment and ranking criteria, and rank reversal. (Nam et al 2019).…”