| Summary: | An increase of population and density of residential areas may cause problems for a municipality. These problems occur when growth takes place within an existing system for water and wastewater which does not have the capacity to support the increased population and a need for capacity en-hancement of the system emerges. This, together with increased requirements where the main focus is on environmental issues, natural resource management and the importance of having a long-term plan, has led to a need for new methods for decision-making. Multicriteria analysis is the generic name for a number of methods designed for situations of complex decision-making where it is essential that the problems are structured and that the different objectives, requirements and areas of influence are evaluated in a transparent way to ensure that the decision reached is the best possible. The objective of this work was to investigate how Multicriteria analysis can be used to assess the suggested measures for capacity enhancement of systems for water and wastewater within an area of population growth. A literature review was conducted in order to gather a number of commonly used criteria for the as-sessment of water and wastewater systems. A proposal for a methodology was presented and exempli-fied in a case study. The proposed method included a linear additive method for multi-criteria analysis where the aim for the analysis, the final selection and weighting of the criteria was conducted in a peer-group consisting of personnel from the municipality's department of water and wastewater, the municipality's department of environment and Luleå University of Technology. The criteria selected for the case study was: Total cost, Impact on recipient, Natural resource management, Population growth, Time, Robustness and Life expectancy. The optional alternatives developed for the case study were assessed and graded regarding how well they performed towards the different criteria. The different criteria were assigned weights and the ...
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