Robust Priority for Strategic Environmental Assessment with Incomplete Information Using Multi-Criteria Decision Making Analysis

This study investigates how the priority rankings for dam construction sites vary with multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques and generation approaches for incomplete information. Strategic environmental assessment (SEA) seeks to recommend sustainable dam construction sites based on their environmental and ecological impacts in a long-term plan for dam construction (LPDC) in South Korea. However, if specific information is missing, the SEA is less useful for choosing a dam construction site. In this study, we applied AHP, ELECTRE III, PROMETHEE II and Compromise Programming as MCDM techniques, and used binomial and uniform distributions to generate missing information. We considered five dam site selection situations and compared the results as they depended on both MCDM techniques and information generation methods. The binomial generation method showed the most obvious priorities. All MCDM techniques showed similar priorities in the dam site selection results except for ELECTREE III. The results demonstrate that selecting an appropriate MCDM technique is more important than the data generation method. However, using binomial distribution to generate missing information is more effective in providing a robust priority than uniform distribution, which is a commonly used technique.