Environmental Issue and an Associated Pattern Recognition Approach Applied to Environment Impact Assessment
J. Xia, S. X. Shi · 2001
China is a developing country with much more pressure from his population growth, water problems and environmental issue. This paper develops an associated pattern recognition approach (APRA) for evaluating and ranking multi-objective decisions with temporal and spatial dimensions. The APRA integrates the association measurement theory and comprehensive pattern recognition approach into a general framework. It converts a complicated multi-objective decision-making problem with temporal and spatial dimensions into a clustering issue of multi-vector series. The simplified version of original problem can be easily solved by distance comparison with the best decision scheme and the worst decision scheme, respectively. The results regarding ranking multi-objective decisions and implementing priority can then be obtained. The developed method has been applied to case studies in the areas of economic benefit analysis and environmental impact assessment. The results indicate that multi-objective decisions with temporal and spatial dimensions can be insightfully evaluated. They can provide useful information for making decisions for practical problems with multi-objective and temporal/spatial dimension characteristics.