A multi-risk criteria assessment methodology applied to the analysis of nitrogen dioxide concentrations in European capital cities

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-risk criteria assessment methodology that can be used for air quality assessment. The method consists first in evaluating the risk for a given set of alternatives with different risk measures and then in applying multi-criteria decision-making methods to determine the final risk assessment. As risk criteria the risk measures: mean, standard deviation, loss probability, value at risk, and conditional tail expectation provide the principles for the initial risk evaluation. Then, the multi-criteria decision-making methods: technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, additive ratio assessment, combinative distance-based assessment, and weighted aggregated sum product assessment are used to classify the alternatives in terms of risk by means of a ranking. The methodology is applied to air pollution risk assessment, where a dataset of monthly average nitrogen dioxide concentrations in 11 European capital cities, in the time horizon from January 2018 to December 2023, is analysed.