(639f) Modeling Waste Water Treatment Plant Efficiency “An Integrated Approach"

Man's desires for ultimate joy and comfort have led him to exploit nature's free goods to the extent of reducing its natural capacities for self stabilization. As a consequence of this outright disregard of the impact of these activities on the environment, numerous environmental problems have arisen. So today's need is to enhance the awareness among the people to maintain environmental quality.

Evaluating the efficiency of waste water treatment system often requires decision makers to consider conflicting, vague, and uncertain information. Fuzzy set theory offers a possible means of managing these kinds of data or information. This study, proposes a systematic approach to evaluating efficiency of waste water treatment system in a fuzzy environment. The approach employs three main concepts: linguistic variables, fuzzy numbers, and an analytic hierarchy process. The linguistic variables are used to represent the degree of appropriateness of decision criteria, which are vague or uncertain. These linguistic variables are then translated into fuzzy numbers to reflect their uncertainties and aggregated into the final fuzzy decision value using a hierarchical structure. Through a case study, the approach is applied to the evaluation of the efficiency of waste water treatment system consisting of three types of treatment processes, physical, chemical and biological. The results demonstrate that the developed approach can be a useful tool for evaluating the efficiency of waste water treatment system, where criteria are vague or imprecise.

Key words: Evaluating the efficiency, linguistic variables, efficiency of waste water treatment system