A multicriteria decision support approach for evaluating highly complex adaptive reuse plans

How to handle an environmental/urban decision problem with many alternatives and the presence of several interdependent criteria? Starting from the ‘Futur-e Project’ of the main Italian distributor of electricity, the paper proposes an integrated MCDA approach illustrated by the comparison of alternative projects for the reuse of a large abandoned thermoelectric power plant in Italy. We focus on the following aspects: 1) evaluation of the feasible plan performances with respect to criteria; 2) construction of a reliable decision support model requiring the decision-maker parsimonious preference information. We adopted an assessment framework based on the Choquet integral to represent interaction between criteria, parsimonious AHP reducing the number of pairwise comparisons, and SMAA permitting to explore the space of different recommendations supplied by the decision model in case of perturbation of its parameters. We report on the evolution of the procedure and on the aspects of the support provided by the adopted approach.