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

Abstract

There are various processes which can be used for wastewater treatment (WT), and the selection of the most sustainable one among different processes is a hard task. This study aims at helping the decision-makers (DM) to address this by developing an intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) theory based group multi-attribute decision analysis (MADA) method. 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 developed in this study allow different experts to attend the SM, and enable the participants to employ the natural language/words to depict their intuitionistic opinions. Accordingly, the proposed method can achieve group SM under uncertainties. An illustrative case including four processes for wastewater treatment, namely Anaerobic-Anoxic-Oxic (AAO) process, Triple Oxidation Ditch (TOD) process, Anaerobic single-ditch oxidation (ASD) process, and Sequencing batch reactor activated sludge process (SBR), has been studied, and the results reveal that this method can determine sustainability sequence of different WT processes.