An Integration of Quantitative and Qualitative Decision Support for Environmental Impact Assessment

A complicated decision-making problem such as environmental impact assessment usually requires both quantitative and qualitative decision support tools to collaborate for reaping their benefits concurrently. Although the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been widely used in EIA, it is hardly to address the dependence issue among environmental factors and reflect the subjectivity between science and societal values and beliefs. This paper proposes an integrated model to incorporate fuzzy analytic network process (quantitative decision support) with fuzzy logic (qualitative decision support) for managing environmental impact assessment. Finally, the proposed approach was applied to the EIEs of construction projects, exemplified in a case study of the Taiwan High-Speed Rail project.