Developing utility functions for environmental decision making

The selection of a technology for the cleanup of a contaminated site is com plicated by the involvement of multiple stakeholders with conflicting objec tives. Multi-attribute decision analysis can be employed to assess the impa ct of the alternative technologies on a number of performance measures and to rank these alternatives according to the preferences of each stakeholder . In this paper, we present an approach to constructing the utility functio ns that decision analysis requires using stakeholder input. The proposed ap proach is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process and accounts for linguist ic imprecision in the stakeholder assessments. The experience from a real c ase study is reported and discussed. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.