Speaker
Description
Multicriteria decision aiding provides a structured way to evaluate environmental technologies involving multiple objectives, heterogeneous indicators, and trade-offs between technical, economic, and environmental performance. This study develops an integrated assessment framework for comparing sulfur recovery scenarios in flue gas treatment systems. Three alternatives are evaluated: a conventional chemical scrubber, a bioscrubber using pure glycerine as electron donor, and a bioscrubber using purified crude glycerol. The assessment combines process modelling, life cycle assessment, life cycle costing, and TOPSIS-based multi-criteria decision analysis.
A set of technical, environmental, and economic key performance indicators is used to describe the performance of each scenario. Equal-weight TOPSIS and CRITIC-weighted TOPSIS are compared to examine how objective weighting influences the final ranking. The CRITIC method assigns higher importance to indicators with greater contrast intensity and lower redundancy, while TOPSIS ranks alternatives according to their relative closeness to the positive ideal solution. Sensitivity analysis is further applied to examine the robustness of the ranking results.
The results show that the bioscrubber using purified crude glycerol achieves the most balanced overall performance, particularly due to its advantages in cost-related and resource-related indicators. The comparison between weighting strategies highlights that the final decision is sensitive not only to the absolute performance of each alternative, but also to the interaction between indicator variability, correlation structure, and decision weights. This work demonstrates how MCDA can support transparent and reproducible sustainability assessment for emerging environmental technologies.
| Keywords | Multiple criteria decision aiding; TOPSIS; CRITIC weighting; Sulfur recovery; Bioscrubbing; Life cycle assessment; Life cycle costing; Environmental decision-making |
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| Participation in the SNSF Early-Stage Researcher Support and Award Scheme | I am submitting a regular presentation and would like to participate in the SNSF Early-Stage Researcher Support and Award Scheme. |