Introduction

The International Centre for Science and High Technology is an institution within the legal framework of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), with headquarters located in Trieste, Italy at the AREA Science Park. The Center's mandate is the transfer of know-how and technology in favor of developing countries and is based on the premise that competitive industrial technological capability cannot be built-up without adequate scientific knowledge and commitment to a sustainable development approach based in new and environmentally friendly technologies.

In the present work programme, ICS-UNIDO activities focus on specific sectors within the area of chemistry, environment and high technology and new materials. The priority programme, which is being developed in the Area of Pure and Applied Chemistry, includes remediation technologies, which is justified by the fact that many areas, especially in developing countries, are seriously contaminated or damaged with consequent impoverishment of natural resources and serious effects on human health.

Remediation is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive operation. A variety of mature and emerging remediation technologies is available and future trends in remediation will include continued competition among environmental service companies and technology developers, which will definitely result in further increase in the clean-up options. As a result, there is a greater demand for decision support tools that can aid the decision makers in selecting the most suitable technology for the specific contaminated site.

Remediation of contaminated soil, groundwater and sediment is a field of technology that has developed and grown recently. Development and use of remediation technologies has progressed and a large number of clean-up alternatives have evolved and improved over the past decade. Decision makers are faced with the challenge of selecting and deploying the most appropriate soil remediation technologies to address a variety of problems and, in some cases, satisfy a number of conflicting criteria.

DARTS Overview

DARTS is a software-based decision support tool with complete and comprehensive reporting basis on remediation methods was designed and implemented by ICS-UNIDO. The software acts as environmental consultant, providing a Decision Aid for Remediation Technology Selection (DARTS) by comparing different remediation scenarios and choosing of the most suitable in-situ or ex-situ remediation treatment technologies for environmental remediation.

The decision maker is asked by DARTS to find the most preferred solutions by specifying goals and relative weightings for the multiple criteria. The weightings can be changed to assess sensitivity of solution or to reflect different options. The parameters considered at DARTS analysis represent criteria of soil, groundwater and sediment quality for degraded or polluted sites and may used also to evaluate a sustainable management use of these sources. By the use of a simple scoring approach, the user must to decide whether to accept or reject a potential quality indicator for degraded or polluted sites. The criteria include site information, social-economic factors (rating parameters), selected contaminants and selected physical, chemical and biological process for a site treatment. Each parameter is given a score based on the user's knowledge and experience of it. The sum of the individual scores gives the level of acceptance score which can be ranked in comparison to other potential remediation techniques, thus aiding the selection of a remediation method for a specific contaminated site.

Thus, a Decision Aid for Remediation Technology Selection (DARTS) has been developed, with the aim of closely working with human decision makers to assess the available technologies and preliminarily select the preferred remedial options. DARTS aim at providing a decision support for the evaluation of clean-up alternatives and selection of the best available technology for the site concerned, simultaneously taking into account a number of different technical, economic, social, legal and environmental criteria. A multicriteria analysis is performed by DARTS to compare the relative merits of the remediation alternatives and select from among them the most appropriate for site clean-up implementation.