Ranking environmental projects model based on multicriteria decision-making and the weight sensitivity analysis*

With the fast growth of Chinese economic, more and more capital will be invested in environmental projects. How to select the environmental investment projects (alternatives) for obtaining the best environmental quality and economic benefits is an important problem for the decision makers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a decision-making model to rank a finite number of alternatives with several and sometimes conflicting criteria. A model for ranking the projects of municipal sewage treatment plants is proposed by using exports' information and the data of the real projects. And, the ranking result is given based on the PROMETHEE method. Furthermore, by means of the concept of the weight stability intervals (WSI), the sensitivity of the ranking results to the size of criteria values and the change of weights value of criteria are discussed. The result shows that some criteria, such as “proportion of benefit to project cost”, will influence the ranking result of alternatives very strong while others not. The influence are not only from the value of criterion but also from the changing the weight of criterion. So, some criteria such as “proportion of benefit to project cost” are key critera for ranking the projects. Decision makers must be cautious to them.