Risk-based evaluation of wastewater treatment projects: A case study in Niasar city, Iran

• The risk-based multi-attribute decision making (RB-MADM) methods are used for sustainable wastewater management.
• Feasibility of the suggested approaches is demonstrated with a case study in Niasar city, Iran.
• Six RB-MADM methods are used to perform a comparison between wastewater treatment systems.
• The results show that modeling the risk attitude of decision makers has a significant effect on the final decision.

For sustainable wastewater management, it is essential to consider social, environmental, geological and technical features as well as economic feature in the decision-making process. A limitation of many of the earlier works on wastewater management is that they take into account only financial criteria to make a decision for a given problem. Moreover, the decision-makers’ (DMs) attitude to risk, or optimism degree, when faced with uncertainty is not considered. In this paper, we study the application of risk-based multi-attribute decision-making (RB-MADM) methods to achieve sustainable wastewater management. Consideration of uncertainty, value tradeoffs, and different risk attitudes of decision makers are the important features of the developed methodology. A case study on the Iranian city of Niasar is presented to illustrate how this methodology can be applied to select the most preferred alternative for wastewater management among a set of options. The most preferred option is selected with respect to nine attributes under different optimism/pessimism degrees, using six different MADM methods. The results show that the ranking of options is sensitive to the optimism degree of the DMs. The proposed approach may help policy makers to achieve sustainable wastewater management.