Restoring a Radionuclide Contaminated Aquatic Ecosystem: A Group Decision Making Problem with Incomplete Information within MAUT Accounting for Veto

Abstract

In this paper we consider the evaluation of intervention countermeasures for the restoration of a radionuclide contaminated aquatic ecosystem, simultaneously taking into account several conflicting objectives, like environmental, social and economic impacts. We propose an extension of the additive multi-attribute utility model to incorporate the concept of veto to deal with this group decision-making problem. Moreover, we consider what is known as decision-making with partial, imprecise or incomplete information, which accounts for uncertainty about the alternative performances and imprecision concerning DM preferences by means of intervals or ordinal information. Veto values for the most important DMs are used to define veto ranges, whereas veto values corresponding to the other less important DMs are partially taken into account, leading to the construction of adjust ranges. We then build the veto and adjust functions into the additive model, and a dominance matrix accounting for incomplete information is computed. A dominance measuring method is then used to derive a ranking of alternatives for each DM, which are then aggregated taking into account their relative importance.