Modeling heterogeneous experts' preference ratings for environmental impact assessment through a fuzzy decision making system

Abstract

Currently, there is an increasing demand for more efficient and practical environmental impact assessment (EIA) tools due to the emerging climate change challenges and need to better evaluate and control impacts of industrial technologies and activities. However, due to the inherent uncertainties, vagueness's of assessment data, traditional EIA methods are unable to handle efficiently and properly such decision making process, and consequently more efficient method resorts to the opinions of group of relevant experts in order to enhance the reliability of the assessment decision. However, experts' assessments are usually in heterogeneous forms, multi-metric or multi-criterion and usually conflicting. This article presents a fuzzy decision making systems (FDMS) that enables heterogeneous experts' preference ratings assessment and provides for aggregation of those opinions over multi-metric scales. Experts can provide their opinion in form of crisp, linguistic or fuzzy values. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.