Waste disposal site selection using an analytic hierarchal pairwise comparison and ELECTRE approaches under fuzzy environment

The focus of this study was to carry out an evaluation of solid waste disposal site selection in the city Arak of Iran. Based on published information, different methods have been applied to address this problem, among which Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) has been found to be a fruitful approach. Owing to the imprecision in the objective and subjective factors affecting the problem, for tackling the uncertainty and imprecision in human behavior, in this paper a new fuzzy MCDA approach is applied in an intelligible manner to construct the real decision matrix. Fuzzy Multicriteria Hierarchy Process (FMHP) and ELECTRE methods are the two successive steps employed to cope with imprecision in the assessment of the criteria and alternatives to select the best site. Given a fuzzy judgment matrix, FMHP produces a real decision matrix that is applied as an input for ELECTRE to build outranking relations among the actions. The integration of FMHP and ELECTRE considers both the fuzziness and partiality of the factors affecting site selection problem into account and avoids compensatory offsets between several criteria with weak and strong values. Finally, the conducted sensitivity analysis indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method as an instrumented decision support model.