Strategic decision support in waste management systems by state reduction in FCM models

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new design for modeling sustainable waste management systems. By its complexity, this model is much more precise in describing the real systems than those found in the relevant literature. We set up a model with six factors and then decomposed the constituting factors up to around thirty subcomponents, thereby established an extremely complex and completely novel model of the Integrated Waste Management System (IWMS) using the system-of-system (SoS) approach with the help of experts. After the investigation of the basic and detailed model and their connection matrices, the following idea arises. The two models differ conceptually and so greatly that less than thirty-three factors should be enough to approximately describe the mechanism of action of the real IWMS. In the following, a new state reduction method is proposed. It can be considered as a generalization of the state reduction procedure of sequential systems and finite state machines. The essence of the proposal is to create clusters of factors and to build a new model using these clusters as factors. This way the number of factors can be decreased to make the model easier to understand and use. Our main goal with this method is to support the strategic decision making process of the stakeholder in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of IWMS.