Environmental impact assessment based on D numbers

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a complex problem influenced by many aspects, such as environmental, social, economic, etc. Due to the involvement of human judgment, various uncertainties are introduced in the EIA process. One critical issue of EIA is the representation and handling of uncertain information. Many different theories are available to deal with uncertainty, however, deficiencies exist in these theories. In this paper, based on a more effective representation of uncertainty, called D numbers, a new method is proposed for the EIA problem. In the proposed method, the assessment results of environmental impacts are expressed and modeled by D numbers. An illustrative case is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.