A CBR–AHP Hybrid Method to Support the Decision-Making Process in the Selection of Environmental Management Actions

Abstract

This paper proposes a hybrid method integrating case-based reasoning (CBR) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods to reinforce the sustainable performance of an environmental management system. The CBR–AHP method aims to support the decision-making process to select environmental management actions (EMAs) aimed at reducing risky trends of the environmental state of a region. The CBR methods takes advantage of a set of situation–solution pairs called cases, which are stored in a memory and then retrieved as candidates to solve new problems. Situations in this work are represented by a set of risky trends of key environmental pathways (KEPs) related to CO2 emissions, air quality, loss of vegetation cover, water availability, and solid waste, the combination of which damage the environmental state quality of a region. Meanwhile, solutions are represented by a set of EMAs. Similar situations to a given current situation are retrieved from the memory of cases, and then their solutions are combined through an adaptation mechanism, until the solution of the current problem is obtained. The AHP method is used to assign weights to environmental variables and to alternative solutions represented by EMAs. We used risky trends derived from real data related to the environmental states of a Mexican region to test the proposed CBR–AHP hybrid method. The results obtained provided insights into the potential of the CBR–AHP hybrid method to support the decision-making process to select EMAs aimed at reducing risky trends of current environmental states.

A Review of Uncertain Decision-Making Methods in Energy Management Using Text Mining and Data Analytics

“…It is generally applied to rank alternatives using paired comparisons [18,19]. The AHP has been implemented across a wide variety of research areas such as supply chain [20], business and marketing [21], supplier selection [22], engineering and manufacturing [23], environmental management [24], human resources management [25], and sustainable energy [26].…”

Research on emergency treatment technology for water pollution accidents where the pollutants are not included in the emergency database

“…However, industrialization is accompanied by various environmental pollution problems, and sudden water pollution has entered a high incidence period, making emergency treatment even more demanding and challenging (Duan et al 2011;Xu et al 2019). At present, research on sudden water pollution accidents focuses on macro-management measures, emergency plans, risk assessment, and emergency monitoring (Dibike et al 2018;Gashi et al 2018;Mandaric et al 2018;Ramos-Quintana et al 2019), etc., and there is little research on emergency technology decision-making. Fan et al (2014); Liu et al (2015); Liu et al (2016); Zheng et al (2020) calculated the similarity between sudden pollution accidents and historical cases based on case-based reasoning (CBR) by taking the contaminated state of accident sites (such as pollutant type and concentration, etc.)…”