An Intelligent Decision Support System for Environmental Impact Assessment of Industrial Projects

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of industrial projects is a typically illstructured, multi-aspect, multi-criterion decision making problem, in which usually not all input relevant factors are known, and the relationships between these factors and the direct impact on environmental elements can not be stated or formulated exactly. The assessment can have several dimensions like air pollution impact, water pollution impact, etc. Each dimension has its own set of homogenous variables. This paper presents a modular decision making solution for treating the complex ill-structured EIA decision problem. The proposed solution is an intelligent environmental decision support system (EDSS) that makes use of human expertise’s and fuzzy logics in assessing the environmental impacts of the proposed or existing industrial projects. It consists of multiple fuzzy expert systems (FESs), each of which contains the homogenous knowledge’s and expertise’s relevant to a one environmental dimension. Simple and efficient heuristics are introduced for integrating FESs within the proposed EDSS.