Multicriteria Decision Analysis Addressing Marine and Terrestrial Plastic Waste Management: A Review

This paper is a systematic review of studies that used multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) to address plastic waste management. A literature search for scientific articles in online databases (Web of Science and Scopus) enabled us to identify 20 relevant papers from 2008 to 2021, spanning case studies in three continents. These studies focus on: plastics as a resource (material), plastics as a product (reverse logistics), and plastics as a problem (pollution). Content analysis methodology was used, with the focus being on how the authors used MCDA for managing plastic waste, which has relevance for researchers and practitioners. Alternative solutions were found for the selection of disposal methods for almost all types of plastic categorized in this review. The most popular method was AHP, followed by TOPSIS, outranking methods, MAUT/MAVT and simple weighted sums, with some studies including more than one method. The choice of criteria spanned operational (mostly), but also environmental and economic aspects to evaluate the alternatives. Less frequently, one finds criteria related to social, managerial, and political aspects. The weighting of the criteria was performed mainly by consulting experts, followed by decision makers. Representatives of the affected population or other stakeholders have been consulted only on a few occasions. The authors of the studies consider their application of MCDA was successful, highlighting mainly the importance of being able to encompass different dimensions in the evaluation of the alternatives and the transparency of the process. In most cases, a winning alternative emerged clearly, which sometimes was a combination of multiple strategies. We also report other recommendations of these authors concerning marine and terrestrial plastic waste management.

An Integrated Approach of Strategic Planning and Multi-Criteria Analysis to Evaluate Transport Strategies in Railway Network

This chapter presents a methodology for selecting transport strategy for railway passenger transport development. The strategic planning, as Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis and Strengths - Weaknesses – Opportunities - Threats (SWOT) analysis integrated with Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) have been applied as a tool to make decision. The proposed methodology consists five stages. The first stage formulates the alternatives of the policies for railway manager. The criteria in each PESTLE group have been defined in the second step. The total number of 24 criteria has been studied. In third stage, the SIMUS method based on linear programming has been applied to rank the alternatives and assess the criteria in PESTLE groups. The fourth stage represents the ranking by application the different multi0criteria approaches as distance based, utility based and outranking methods to make decision. The combination the PESTLE analysis with SWOT analysis for strategic planning is done in the fifth stage. The integration of the PESTLE with technical, economic, technological and environmental (TETE) analysis in presented. The application of methodology has been demonstrated with an example for Bulgarian railway network. Three strategies of railway transport development have been evaluated and compared. It was found that the most important are the political (0.29), social (0.25) and technological (0.25) groups in PESTLE analysis.

Setting Thresholds to Define Indifferences and Preferences in PROMETHEE for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of European Hydrogen Production

The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) is a proven method for sustainability assessment. However, the interpretation phase of an LCSA is challenging because many different single results are obtained. Additionally, performing a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is one way—not only for LCSA—to gain clarity about how to interpret the results. One common form of MCDAs are outranking methods. For these type of methods it becomes of utmost importance to clarify when results become preferable. Thus, thresholds are commonly used to prevent decisions based on results that are actually indifferent between the analyzed options. In this paper, a new approach is presented to identify and quantify such thresholds for Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) based on uncertainty of Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods. Common thresholds and this new approach are discussed using a case study on finding a preferred location for sustainable industrial hydrogen production, comparing three locations in European countries. The single LCSA results indicated different preferences for the environmental, economic and social assessment. The application of PROMETHEE helped to find a clear solution. The comparison of the newly-specified thresholds based on LCIA uncertainty with default thresholds provided important insights of how to interpret the LCSA results regarding industrial hydrogen production.

Novel Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Making Method for the Selection of Open Unit Trusts Under Uncertainty

Investment decision making is a complex process. Important decision concerns the (pre)selection of potential investment instruments to compose an investment portfolio. Conscientious selection involves the application of quantitative multi-criteria procedures. The typical element of uncertainty (i.e. unstable return or investor’s vague preferences about the criteria importance) must be considered. This combination of the typical characteristics of investment on the capital market can be addressed by means of fuzzy multi-attribute decision making methods. These methods effectively quantify the vague elements by using fuzzy numbers. However, the applicability of a relevant method sufficiently depends on the actual investment decision making problem. This article focuses on open unit trusts because this market is recently becoming more popular in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, under all the practical and theoretical specifics of this type of investment, there is no known evaluation method that can satisfactorily solved this problem. Therefore, the main aim of this article is to propose a novel fuzzy multi-attribute decision making method that works for all investment conditions. Its algorithm is inspired by some principles of the outranking methods. The evaluation of open unit trusts offered by the Česká spořitelna, clearly demonstrates all of the benefits of the proposed concept compared to the existing methods.

Characterization of Electre I choice procedures

This paper discusses choice procedures that select the set of best alternatives taking into account reflexive binary relations (called pseudo-tournaments in the paper), such as those that can be obtained when constructing an outranking relation à la Electre. The paper contains interesting results which link together the second “exploitation” step in the Electre I outranking method with two choice procedures (Gocha and Getcha choice procedures also known in the literature as Schwartz set and Smith set respectively). A set of results that characterize some properties of the two outranking methods (ElectI and ElectIP choice procedures) is also presented.

Outranking Methods: Promethee I and Promethee II

This article highlights the application of the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE) I and II in selecting the best laptop model among six different available models in the market. Seven important criteria, that is, processor, hard disk capacity, operating system, RAM, screen size, brand, and color, are selected, based on which the selection process have been made. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted for calculating the weightages of the seven criteria and PROMETHEE is applied to select the best alternative. PROMETHEE I provides the partial ranking and preferences of one model over another, whereas PROMETHEE II provides the complete ranking of the alternatives. From this analysis, Model 4 is coming out to be the best laptop model occupying the first position and Model 1 occupies the last position, thus indicating it as the worst model among the group. The objectives of this article are to select the best laptop model among six available alternatives and to understood the steps of both multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies, that is, PROMETHEE and AHP, in details.

Developing a Web Credibility Evaluation Tool Using PROMETHEE Method

In recent years, the Internet has become an indispensable way for users to find information which is almost instantaneously available. However, the presence of information on different websites makes the user needs to pre-check the credibility of the selected websites. Most users find it difficult to assess website credibility in terms of its particular characteristics or factors. Accordingly, we proposed an automated evaluation tool which considers various factors to assess the credibility of different websites and rank them from the highest credibility score to the lowest in order to allow the user to select the most credible website. We used the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMOTHEE). The latter is one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods (MCDM). It combines pairwise comparison and outranking methods in order to give more accurate and superior credibility scores due to its enrichment evaluations. For the proposed tool to be acceptable, we carried out a correlation analysis to determine the coefficient of correlation between human judges and the proposed tool. We found the coefficient of correlation rho is 0.943 which indicates that there is a strong correlation between the human judges’ ranking and the ranking given by the proposed website evaluation tool.

ELECTRE ME: a proposal of an outranking modeling in situations with several evaluators

Highlights: This paper describes an original proposal for modeling Multicriteria problems taking into account more than one evaluator. It allows each evaluator to have its own set of criteria. It also avoids the incoherency of adopting compensatory techniques into non-compensatory algorithms. Goal: This paper describes an original proposal for modeling multicriteria situations where multiple evaluators take part of the evaluation process. This proposal allows each evaluator to have its own set of criteria, including their weights, and also avoids the usual inconsistency of adopting pre-processing compensatory methods for introducing it into non-compensatory algorithms. Design / Methodology / Approach: In order to better describe how ELECTRE ME works, a multicriteria-multiple evaluator situation is modeled by ELECTRE TRI ME (as we have called the ELECTRE TRI variation that incorporates the principles of multiple evaluators). Results: ELECTRE ME was able to avoid the inconsistency of adopting contradictory mechanisms of aggregating preferences while modeling multicriteria & multiple evaluators problems (first called here as MCDA-ME). Limitations: Although the proposal focuses in situations with multiple evaluators, there is no restriction for its application in situations where there is only one decision maker. Practical implications: Another important feature of ELECTRE ME is that it allows each evaluator to consider its own set of criteria and its own scale for evaluation. Originality / Value: ELECTRE ME avoids a contradictory approach to use compensatory algorithms (such as weighted mean) as an input in non-compensatory outranking methods. Despite the fact that non-compensatory principle is in the heart of the ELECTRE methods, it has not found a previous proposal with the attributes shown in this study: to incorporate outranking concepts in situations where more than one evaluator is present and, by extension, allow each evaluator to have its own set of criteria.