Interactive fuzzy boundary interval programming for air quality management under uncertainty

This paper presents an interactive fuzzy boundary interval programming (IFBIP) approach for addressing dual uncertainties that exist in the objective function and the left- and right-hand sides of constraints. IFBIP permits an interactive participation of the decision maker (DM) in all steps of the decision process through expressing his/her preferences in linguistic terms. A regional air quality management problem is studied to illustrate the proposed approach. The results indicate that a number of decision alternatives can be obtained under different feasibility degrees of constraints. They can help quantify the relationship between the total operating cost and the constraint violation risk, which is meaningful not only for supporting an in-depth analysis of the tradeoff between the economic objective and the system safety but also for the DM to identify a desired compromise between two conflicting concerns: the satisfaction degree of the goal and the feasibility degree of constraints.