Multicriteria decision support in a technology competition for cleaning polluted soil in Helsinki

Due to expansion of the capital area in Finland, industrial areas are being replanned for residential and commercial use. The soil in these areas is s ometimes contaminated, and must therefore be cleaned before building. In sp ring 1997 the City of Helsinki and the National Technology Agency of Finlan d declared a contract-based competition for cleaning the polluted soil of t he planned Toukolanranta residential area. Nine proposals entered the compe tition, and the problem was to choose three best candidates for test-cleani ng a small part of the region considered. The winner of the test-cleaning p hase will get the contract for cleaning the whole area. The proposals were evaluated based on five criteria defined by the competition board consistin g of eight experts. The finalists were chosen aided by the SMAA-2 Stochasti c Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis technique. SMAA-2 is a method for an alysing what kind of preferences favour each alternative. This method is pa rticularly useful in applications, where it is difficult or impossible to o btain accurate preference information. In this application SMAA-2 was obser ved to suit well for choosing a small set of best alternatives with differe nt strengths and weaknesses. (C) 2000 Academic Press.