Fuzzy outranking for environmental assessment. Case study: iron and steel making industry

Recent years have seen a world-wide change in the environmental policy towards integrated pollution prevention, taking into account all environmental media. Consequently, the environmental assessment of production techniques has to consider multiple criteria which cannot be aggregated to one single index. The concepts of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) seem a suitable means in order to implement Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into integrated decision processes. The outranking methods as a special subgroup of MCDM methods are particularly suitable for integral decision making through the notion of weak preference and incomparability, which better represent the real decision situation, as demonstrated in this paper. Especially the outranking method PROMETHEE brings together flexibility and simplicity for the user and is therefore chosen for the enhancement towards the evaluation of fuzzy data on preferences, scores and weights. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.