A modified D numbers methodology for environmental impact assessment

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is usually evaluated by many factors influenced by various kinds of uncertainty or fuzziness. As a result, the key issues of EIA problem are to rep­resent and deal with the uncertain or fuzzy information. D numbers theory, as the extension of Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, is a desirable tool that can express uncertainty and fuzziness, both complete and incomplete, quantitative or qualitative. However, some shortcomings do exist in D numbers combination process, the commutative property is not well considered when multiple D numbers are combined. Though some attempts have made to solve this problem, the previous method is not appropriate and convenience as more information about the given evaluations rep­resented by D numbers are needed. In this paper, a data-driven D numbers combination rule is proposed, commutative property is well considered in the proposed method. In the combination process, there does not require any new information except the original D numbers. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. First published online: 09 May 2017

Keywords

• D numbers theory
• EIA
• decision making
• uncertainty
• incompleteness
• fuzziness