IFTCP: An integrated method for petroleum waste management under uncertainty

Petroleum waste management has been of much concern in recent years since pollution from petroleum industries may lead to various impacts and risks to environmental systems. In this study, an interval fuzzy two-stage chance-constrained linear programming (IFTCP) method is developed for planning petroleum waste management systems. The IFTCP improves upon the existing optimization methods by allowing uncertainties presented in terms of intervals, fuzzy sets, and probability distributions to be effectively incorporated within the optimization framework. Moreover, it can support the analysis of policy scenarios that are associated with economic penalties when the promised targets are violated. The developed method is then applied to a case of long-term petroleum waste management planning. Interval solutions, which are associated with different levels of constraint-violation risk and system satisfaction degree, have been obtained by solving two submodels based on an interactive algorithm. They can be used to generate decision alternatives and support an in-depth analysis of the tradeoff between system cost and system-failure risk.