A Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Inference System for Developing a Sustainability Index of Biomass

Fausto Cavallaro
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Fausto Cavallaro: Department of Economics, Management, Society and Institutions (EGSI), University of Molise, Via De Sanctis, 86100 Campobasso, Italy

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 9, 1-13

Abstract: One aspect of the use of biomass for energy purposes which remains controversial concerns their full environmental sustainability. Considering the crucial importance of this problem, numerous authors have carried out evaluations of the environmental impact of the various types of biomass by means of several approaches. Although some of these methods are excellent environmental evaluation tools, they are unfortunately unable to manage uncertain input data. Instead, fuzzy-set based methods have proven to be able to deal with uncertainty in environmental topics. The original contributions proposed by fuzzy logic relate, on the one hand, to the representation of uncertain and vague information, and, on the other, to handling such information using fuzzy rules. A fuzzy inference system (FIS) constitutes the practice of framing mapping from the input to an output using fuzzy logic. In this paper, we propose an application of Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy inference modelling to build a synthetic index to assess the sustainability of production of the biomass for energy purposes.

Keywords: sustainability assessment; fuzzy inference; biomass (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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