Environmental assessment under uncertainty using Dempster–Shafer theory and Z-numbers

Environmental assessment and decision making is complex leading to uncertainty due to multiple criteria involved with uncertain information. Uncertainty is an unavoidable and inevitable element of any environmental evaluation process. The published literatures rarely include the studies on uncertain data with variable fuzzy reliabilities. This research has proposed an environmental evaluation framework based on Dempster–Shafer theory and Z-numbers. Of which a new notion of the utility of fuzzy number is proposed to generate the basic probability assignment of Z-numbers. The framework can effectively aggregate uncertain data with different fuzzy reliabilities to obtain a comprehensive evaluation measure. The proposed model has been applied to two case studies to illustrate the proposed framework and show its effectiveness in environmental evaluations. Results show that the proposed framework can improve the previous methods with comparability considering the reliability of information using Z-numbers. The proposed method is more flexible comparing with previous work.