WASTE GENERATION PANEL

1. Development Of A Decision Support Software Tool For The Evaluation Of Different Waste Management Scenarios Georgios Stavrakakis1, Natalia Panagiotidou1, Konstantinos Moustakas2*, Dimitris Malamis2, Maria Loizidou2, Vassilis Inglezakis3, Christos Venetis4,Slavko Dvorsak5, Iulian Movila6, NonaArdeleanu6, Lucia Ilieva7 1Technical University of Crete, Electronic and Computer Engineering Dpt., Electric Circuits and Renewable Energy Sources Lab, Chania, Greece. 2 National Technical University of Athens, School of Chemical Engineering, Unit of Environmental Science & Technology,9, Heroon Polytechniou Street, Athens, Greece. 3 EFCon - SC European Focus Consulting SRL, Orizontului Str, bl. 6, sc. B, ap. 32, Bacau, Romania. 4 Euroconsultants SA, 21 Antonis Tritsis St., Thermi 57001, Greece. 5GorenjeSurovina, Vita Kraigherja 5, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia. 6 Regional Environmental Protection Agency Bacau, Bd.Ionita Sandu Sturdza nr.78, P.C. 600269, Bacau, Romania. 7SDCS - Club “Sustainable Development of Civil Society”, 28-A, Dospat Str., Sofia-1463, Bulgaria. * konmoust@central.ntua.gr Co-financed by EC www.balkwaste.eu INTRODUCTION Municipal waste planning and management in Europe, as driven by EC legislation on waste, has primarily been seen as a rational introduction of environmental concerns within the constraints of economic means and the available techniques. These controversial issues often result in difficulties faced by municipalities and other competent authorities in decision making for finding and applying an effective waste management system. The objective of the development of this Decision Support Software Tool (DSST) is to integrate all of these controversies and key elements of integrated waste management system into the decision process. For the purpose of evaluation of alternative scenarios, multiple criteria are used with economic, environmental, technical, social and legislative points of view. After the waste treatment options which are provided by the DSST have been described and criteria have been defined, all of the criteria are quantified for each treatment option. These tasks are developed in the background of the DSST so that the decision maker/user is not involved. Another important task of the DSST in which the decision maker/user is directly involved is the definition of certain input data for their region and the formulation of alternative scenarios using available waste treatment technologies proposed by the DSST. Even if the users have no access to complete data for the situation in their region, they can use the proposed default values to achieve a best guess. For this reason, the decision maker/user is provided with guidelines and error messages in order to validate the feasibility of formulated scenarios. Finally, the DSST will calculate and produce visual impacts, such as evaluation for all the scenarios for each criteria, so that the user is able to visualize and understand the impact of new waste infrastructure. CRITERIA PANEL After the feasibility of alternative scenarios formulated by user has been validated using the general rules, the scenarios are evaluated on each criteria used by the DSST. The analytical output of the evaluation is shown on the criteria table for each user scenario. Also, the output of the evaluation can be visualized for better comprehension as histogram where the criteria have been grouped into social, technical, economic and other categories of criteria. METHODOLOGY • Based on the defined set of criteria and waste treatment technologies the DSST applies Material Flow Analysis (MFA) to depict the inputs and outputs of different treatment options. The Graphical User interface of MATLAB was used for the development of the DSST, while the Matlab Deployment Tool was used for the compilation and creation of the windows standalone application. • The application of the DSST guides the user step by step how to proceed and if it is necessary provides brief information for input data for better understanding. The DSST comprises of the following panels, in which the user inserts different types of input data or uses default values. After the data have been submitted, various intermediate calculations are implemented, so that the final results for evaluation of alternative scenarios could be visualized: • General • Waste Generation • Waste Composition • Targets • Alternative Scenarios • Criteria • The main menu is on the top of the DSST window, so that the user can select one of the above panels each time, as shown in the above picture. In order to control the input of user data and intermediate calculations, the user can not move to the next panel (inactive buttons on the main menu) if the certain input data have not been defined on the previous one or they are not accurate. ALTERNATIVE SCENARIOS PANEL In order to formulate a number of alternative scenarios, the user is required first to define the percentage of source separation per material for the particular number of scenarios taking into account the Directives described in the previous panel. Afterwards, the user can choose the combination of treatment options for organics and residual waste. WASTE GENERATION PANEL The user is required to define waste composition of their region. In case that there is insufficient data, default values for waste composition based on the country selection can be used. ERROR MESSAGES One of the most important tasks of the DSST is to provide the user with guidelines so that the possible errors of user could be avoided. For this purpose, the DSST is responsible for the validation of the data and options inserted by user on each panel. Some examples of the most usual errors are shown below. TARGET PANEL CONCLUSIONS Although the evaluation of different waste treatment scenarios is considered to be a rather complicated issue, the proposed DSST is capable of providing user-friendly interface with user ability to work with the tool and understanding the impacts of various waste treatment options. The simple and clear structure of the DSST tasks, the use of default values and intermediate calculations where the user is not involved and the visualization of outputs contribute to easier evaluation of alternative waste management scenarios and a simplified process for helping decision making. . ISWA WORLD CONGRESS Hamburg, 15th-18th November 2010