A MULTI-CRITERIA RISK ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK FOR IDENTIFYING CRITICAL SYSTEMS, ENVIRONMENTAL VULNERABILITIES, AND INFRASTRUCTURE PRIORITIES

Decisions about which infrastructure systems to protect, repair, or upgrade first are difficult in settings where data are incomplete and environmental pressures compete with service demands. This study proposes a transparent multi-criteria risk assessment framework that integrates three dimensions: system criticality, environmental vulnerability, and infrastructure condition deficit. The framework combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for criterion weighting, min–max normalisation of indicators, and weighted linear combination to produce a composite Infrastructure Priority Index (IPI) and four priority classes. Interdependency among systems is treated as an explicit criterion, and spatial indicators can be derived through GIS overlay. The framework is demonstrated on a synthetic dataset of six hypothetical assets (water, electricity, health, transport, telecommunications, and solid waste) to show how weights, consistency checks, rankings, and sensitivity analyses are computed. The data are illustrative and are not empirical observations. In the demonstration, all pairwise comparison matrices achieved consistency ratios below 0.10, the water treatment plant ranked first in all 10,000 Monte Carlo weight perturbations, and mid-ranked assets exchanged positions under weight uncertainty, showing where decision-makers should concentrate verification effort. The framework is modular, reproducible, and adaptable to local indicator sets, and it provides a basis for field application and expert-elicited weighting in data-limited regions.