Integrating fuzzy multicriteria analysis and uncertainty evaluation in life cycle assessment

The interpretation phase of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies is often hampered by the number and the heterogeneity of impact assessment results as well as by the uncertainties arising from data, models and practitioner's choices. While decision-aiding methods have proven to support this key LCA phase, the inclusion of uncertainty evaluations in these methods is still a new topic in the LCA community. The fuzzy multicriteria method NAIADE [Munda G., 1995. Multicriteria Evaluation in a Fuzzy Environment. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.] has already been used in several LCA case studies and its framework is well suited for the consideration of uncertainty evaluations as well. This paper proposes a modified version of NAIADE, which conforms to the LCA requirements and to the type of uncertainties to be addressed, with an application example. The discussion of the rankings obtained showed how the integration of uncertainty results could help focusing on critical LCA issues and could be coupled with dominance, contribution and gravity analysis for the interpretation of LCA results, especially when the rankings are not fully consistent. This could support engineers and scientists working in LCA discipline as well as managers and decision-makers faced with decision-making problems based on LCA. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.