Municipal Solid Waste site location using a fuzzy logic approach

This work presents a decision-support system (DSS) based on fuzzy logic to select the best site for the installation of a Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfill. Selection of a new site requires the evaluation of many criteria involving environmental, social and economic data. Such a large range of information comprises not only quantitative, but also qualitative criteria. In order to deal with this peculiarity, the developed system used fuzzy rules due to its ability to deal with linguistic variables and most of human reasoning Conventional approaches tend to be less effective in dealing with the imprecise or value nature of the linguistic assessment. A case Study using real data of a recent MSW location in Brazil is presented where the developed system showed good results.