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Research on the Structure and Application of Fuzzy Environmental Impact Assessment Model

Shiaw‐Wen Tien (Graduate Institute of Management of Technology, Chung‐Hua University, 30 Tung‐Shiang, Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan, ROC)
Chia‐Hsiang Hsieh (Graduate Institute of Management of Technology, Chung‐Hua University, 30 Tung‐Shiang, Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan, ROC)
Yi‐Chan Chung (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ta‐House Road, Chung‐Lin, Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan, ROC)
Chih‐Hung Tsai (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ta‐House Road, Chung‐Lin, Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan, ROC)
Yih‐Huei Yu (Graduate Institute of Management of Technology, Chung‐Hua University, 30 Tung‐Shiang, Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan, ROC)

Asian Journal on Quality

ISSN: 1598-2688

Article publication date: 21 August 2004

95

Abstract

Any business activities may have impact on environmental to a certain extent. Enterprises must find appropriate approaches to measure the impact on these environmental aspects, which can be used as the basis to direct enterprises’ efforts to improve the environmental impact. The method used to evaluate significant factors in life cycle assessment standards is the one most commonly used by enterprises in general to measure environmental impact. By this method, the decisive factors of each environmental aspect are given scores according to the preset scoring standard of the organizaion. The scores are added up for each aspect and ranked to assess major environmental apsects. The drawback of this assessment method, that is, it ignores the degree to which each of these factors affects the environment, results in poor credibility. Therefore, this study attempts to solve some qualitative problems by applying to fuzzy theory, in particular, by identifying appropriate fuzzy numbers through fuzzy sets and membership function. Moreover, the study seeks to obtain a crisp value in the process of defuzzifization in order to make up for the shortfall of the original method in dealing with relative weight of decisive factors and thus increase its applicability and credibility. The department of light production of an electronics company is used as an example in this study to measure environmental aspects by employing both the traditional significant factor method and the fuzzy environmental impact assessment model proposed in this study. Based on verification and comparison of results, the model proposed in this study is more feasible as it reduces partiality in decision‐making by taking the relative weights of decisive factors into consideration.

Keywords

Citation

Tien, S., Hsieh, C., Chung, Y., Tsai, C. and Yu, Y. (2004), "Research on the Structure and Application of Fuzzy Environmental Impact Assessment Model", Asian Journal on Quality, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 45-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/15982688200400012

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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