Prediction of Operation Efficiency of Water Treatment Plant with the Help of Multi-criteria Decision-making

Abstract

Nearly a quarter-million people in the earth do not have access to drinking water. Within the 2.5% of water available in the World, only 1 % is utilizable. Due to the various organic and inorganic pollutants in the water, one of the main reasons for nearly 80% of the three million early deaths observed in the developing countries, are due to drinking of contaminated water. That is why, performance of water treatment plants which treats the surface or waste water and supplies to the consumers is required to be regularly monitored so that eminence of the treated water can be ensured. There are various methods available to evaluate the performance of water treatment plants. But most of these methods are subjective and absolute. All the parameters are given equal significance which makes most of the existing methods partially representative of the actual scenario. The present study proposes a new index-based method for evaluation of the performance of the surface water treatment plants. The index was developed with compensatory Multi-criteria decision-making methods to make the index relative as well as objective. According to the results, labor efficiency and length and density of pipelines were found to be the most and least significant parameter in regulating the performance of water treatment plants. The new method was applied to evaluate the performance of a densely populated urban surface water treatment plant. The results from the case study encourage further application of the method.