Multi-Attribute Analysis of the Most Appropriate Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) Technologies

Roenko, N. (1990). Multi-Attribute Analysis of the Most Appropriate Flue Gas Desulfurization (FGD) Technologies. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-90-072

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Abstract

The decision maker in environmental planning problems usually faces a complex system of interrelated components, such as resources, objectives, persons or groups of persons, etc. Often a decision maker has to choose among a finite number of alternatives according to some criteria. One of the problems in development decision making is to account for the interaction between knowledge and politics. In some circumstances political goals and power rather than knowledge easily dominate development decisions but in other circumstances the reverse may be true. In parallel with quantitative estimations the qualitative and relative estimations of parameters are available for the decision maker. So there is a problem to combine different types of estimations. There is also the problem of missing and uncertain data.

In recent years some approaches were proposed to support the decision making process for such complex problems. We can mention Bayesian decision analysis, fuzzy-set based decision analysis, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as outranking methods. There is corresponding software based on these approaches to support decision making process such as Supertree, COPE, Expert Choice, Rank Master, Trigger, etc. Here we consider the problem of choosing of the most appropriate flue gas desulfurization (FGD) technologies for implementation on a power plant as a good example of a complex semistructural problem. The purpose of this work to solve this problem as a test problem using a software package CHOICE designed in the Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. This package is intended to analyze the structure of the problem and then present it and support the decision making process. As Kaplan notes: "A theory is not just the discovery of a hidden fact; the theory is a way of looking at the facts, of organizing and representing them".

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