An Application of Fuzzy Logic to Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is used to evaluate the environmental effects of regional plans and programs. SEA expresses dependencies between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions, buildings, etc.) and environmental pressures, and between these and environmental receptors. In this paper we employ fuzzy logic and many-valued logics together with numeric transformations for performing SEA. In particular, we discuss four models that capture alternative interpretations of the dependencies, combining quantitative and qualitative information. We have tested the four models and presented the results to the expert for validation. The interpretability of the results of the models was appreciated by the expert that liked in particular those models returning a possibility distribution in place of a crisp result.