Multicriteria decision making in selecting best solid waste management scenario: a municipal case study from Bosnia and Herzegovina

• Appropriate criteria for multi-criteria evaluation of best solid waste management scenario selected.
• Defined criteria valuation methods.
• Applied Analytic Hierarchy Process method to decide on criteria relative importance.
• Applied multicriteria optimization to decide on the best scenario.
• Effective and easily implementable support to decision makers on best waste management practices.

In modern challenging environment, decision makers often need fast and effective tools to quickly model and optimize several decision alternatives and then compare them according to various preconditions or performance criteria. Specifically, efficient solid waste management requires responsible administration to implement detailed screening of needs and desired development directions, followed by decision on the implementing measures. Such process results with a number of various solid waste management scenarios, often with mutually conflicting objectives or expected results. These scenarios affect different range of population, relate to diverse problems, vary in costs levels and time needed to become effective.When selecting only one from various scenarios, different groups of decision-makers are involved. Decision-making has to take into account usually conflicting technological, economic, social and environmental objectives. Single-criterion decision-making based on available financial resources as a sole criterion does not respond to such requests.This paper demonstrates the reliability of use of multi-criteria decision making tool for the purpose of selecting the best municipal solid waste management scenario among six different alternatives. The multi-criteria decision making tool enables decision makers to make informed decisions and achieve optimal results.