The assessment of local sustainability using fuzzy logic: an expert opinion system to evaluate environmental sanitation in the Algarve region, Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Canavese, Daniel
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Ortega, Neli Regina Siqueira, Queirós, Margarida
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/28292
• topic: Fuzzy logic; Fuzzy knowledge-based modeling; Sustainable development; Environmental health assessment; Local-regional assessment; Decision making support

tUnderstanding the relationship between environmental factors and public health is critical to improvingsustainability at a sub-national level. Proposals to evaluate the status of environmental health in a regionmust consider factors including the diversity of indicators, geographical scale, incomplete or inaccuratedata and the need for focused methodologies that capture the complexity of this subject. This paperpresents the design of a system based on expert knowledge to assess environmental sanitation in citiesin the Algarve region of Portugal. It was used fuzzy logic to assess uncertainties in the system. Concep-tually, the use of fuzzy sets theory is simple and can integrate human expertise. The current proposaldemonstrates the usefulness of aggregating information and opinion-based classifications to categorizemunicipalities according to their environmental health characteristics. The analysis shows that improvedenvironmental sanitation conditions have been observed in municipalities located in the region’s center.In the west, municipalities have worse conditions not only in environmental health but also in othersustainability indicators. A main feature of the system, presented here, is the ability for users to selectvariables to be considered by experts and opinion-makers without re-modeling, which allows the sys-tem to be adapted to different situations and scenarios. Therefore, the assessment method based on fuzzylogic is useful to investigators looking for a more systemic assessment of sustainability.