utvärdering av en syntesstrategi för uthålliga VA-system - Urban Water

ferent mathematical models for processing data and weighting criteria –
more or less in dialogue with stakeholders. Deterministic distance-to-target
procedures although, do have the disadvantage of being in need of a
defined target, a definition which is seldom done in immediate consensus
and sometimes impossible to reach since the estimations are time and place
dependent. For non-deterministic situations, like this case, the target
was not defined and the criteria to process were both of a quantitative and
qualitative nature.
The approach for the sociocultural criteria was for instance not an impact
assessment, but a methodology for identification of crucial sociocultural
aspects to consider for sustainable urban water systems. Sociocultural
criteria have mainly in previous research been addressed through
social impact assessment emphasising only one–way influences on the
social spheres by the technical structure. However, since the sub-systems
“technology”, “users” and “organisations” within the total urban water
system are mutually affecting each other, the relationships between these
sub-systems have to be described and analysed.
Environment and hygiene were treated as impacts. Technical function
did not include impacts at all, but focused on frequency estimations for
different disturbances to occur. The economy was a straightforward budget
including investment costs and costs for operation and maintenance.
The prerequisites for choosing a multicriteria method able to cope with
the challenges were demanding. Together with the complicated combination
of criteria, the researchers in the program already took a set of critical
decisions when two system structures were designed together with relevant
criteria before this project started. More process-oriented methods
were thereby not possible. Other factors to consider were the sophistication
of the workshop participants (which were high here), the time allocated
to the workshop (six hours), the number of alternatives to be considered,
and the way in which we expected the participants to be comfortable
expressing their preferences.
The method finally used at the workshop was the Regime method, an
outranking method able to give indications of which alternatives are preferred
to others and whether it is impossible to distinguish a preference
between the alternatives at hand. The Regime method is software where
alternatives are compared through a pair-wise comparison for each criterion.
A tool that can be described as a temperature scale was used for weighting
the criteria. This approach was used to provide a possibility to get
reactions from the groups on such a working procedure, and it also provided
analysing possibilities by use of the Yakowitz multiattribute tool.
EVALUATION CRITERIA
Multicriteria procedures aim at support and structure complex planning
and decision-making situations. Since this was no deterministic problem
one of the most important pieces of evidence of a good approach is that
the stakeholders are satisfied with both the process and the outcome. Another
important piece of evidence is satisfaction among the researches
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