Violation analysis for solid waste management systems: an interval fuzzy programming approach

This paper introduces a violation analysis approach for the planning of regional solid waste management systems under uncertainty, based on an interval-parameter fuzzy integer programming (IPFIP) model. In this approach, several given levels of tolerable violation for system constraints are permitted. This is realized through a relaxation of the critical constraints using violation variables, such that the model's decision space can be expanded. Thus, solutions from the violation analysis will not necessarily satisfy all of the model's original constraints. Application of the developed methodology to the planning of a waste management system indicates that reasonable solutions can be generated through this approach. Considerable information regarding decisions of facility expansion and waste flow allocation within the waste management system were generated. The modeling results help to generate a number of decision alternatives under various system conditions, allowing for more in-depth analyses of tradeoffs between environmental and economic objectives as well as those between system optimality and reliability. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.