Developing utility functions for environmental decision making

The selection of a technology for the cleanup of a contaminated site is complicated by the involvement of multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives. Multi-attribute decision analysis can be employed to assess the impact of the alternative technologies on a number of performance measures and to rank these alternatives according to the preferences of each stakeholder. In this paper, we present an approach to constructing the utility functions that decision analysis requires using stakeholder input. The proposed approach is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process and accounts for linguistic imprecision in the stakeholder assessments. The experience from a real case study is reported and discussed. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.