Strategic management decision support system: An analysis of the environmental policy issues

In this paper we present a new approach for modeling environmental problem as a bilevel pro-ramming problem. To the authors best knowledge, this is the first attempt to use bilivel techniques to tackle such problems. We derive at solution to help decision makers to cope with environmental policy issues. San Francisco, Bay Area is used as a real world example with the solution to their environmental problem. California is presently faced with a serious deficit of solid waste treatment and disposal facilities. Federal legislation has sought to compel the States to assure the capacity to treat and dispose of their own wastes and the California Legislature has enacted laws requiring the counties to initiate programs so that they can treat and dispose of their own wastes. Neither the federal nor the State programs have met with success in California. California continues to ship greater and greater amounts of waste out-of-state, and the majority of California counties have not instituted plans acceptable to the State government regarding the treatment and disposal of their own wastes. In the few cases where sitting and licensing programs have been proposed, the policy-makers charged with their evaluation have proceeded with largely intuitive, non-quantitative evaluation of policy options, often ignoring most of the financial and environmental implication of their decisions. We have developed a strategic management decision model that can evaluate multiple solid waste management options from both economic and environmental standpoints. Examples of problems a quantitative model might evaluate include the economic and environmental impacts of multiple treatment or disposal facilities as opposed to only one site; the environmental impact of taxing "dirty" waste streams, thus encouraging waste treatment and/or minimization on-site; and the social risk resulting from transportation risks assuming one or more multiple treatment or disposal sites or the use of alternative transportation routes. Because of extensive information presently available for the San Francisco Bay region, we have investigated the regional waste management problem there under several different treatment and disposal scenarios. As appropriate, results from this regional model and from authors earlier work [1] will be applied to California as a whole.