WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development
Print ISSN: 1790-5079, E-ISSN: 2224-3496
Volume 13, 2017
A Fuzzy Decision Making Method in Developing Environmental Performance Index
Author:
Abstract: Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is used to rank the performance in environment protection for most of the countries in the world. EPI is a score which gives a gauge at a national government scale using the method of proximity-to-target value. The current method fails to consider incomplete and vague environment data in its computations. This paper proposes a new score of EPI using a decision making method of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy TOPSIS. Differently from the typical arithmetic operations of the proximity-to-target value, which directly used subtraction and division, this method introduces the concept of distance to ideal solution based on the decision makers’ assessments. A case of eleven countries in Southeast Asia region was considered to illustrate the computations. Three decision makers were invited to rate the extent of a country performs against the specific environmental criteria using the defined linguistic variables. An interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy decision matrix was constructed based on dual degree of membership elicited from decision makers’ assessment. The closeness coefficient that represents a score for each country was finally established after executing the five-step computation. With the closeness coefficient of 0.8028, Malaysia was the best EPI among the selected countries. The method successfully offers a new score of EPI and subsequently managed to identify the countries’ environmental performance.
Search Articles
Keywords: Environmental assessment, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, environmental criteria, decision making, linguistic assessment
Pages: 350-359
WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1790-5079 / 2224-3496, Volume 13, 2017, Art. #36