An evidential model for environmental risk assessment in projects using Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence

Abstract

One of the goals of sustainable development is to achieve economic and social growth according to environmental criteria. Nowadays, impact assessment is an efficient decision making method in planning and management with environmental perspectives. Environmental risk assessment is a tool to reduce the impacts and consequences of various activities on the environment in order to achieve sustainable development. One of the commonly used environmental risk assessment methods is the probability–impact matrix method, which is known as a quantitative method for risk assessment of projects. In this method, numerical estimates of probability and impact of risk occurrence are very difficult, and these factors are associated with uncertainty. When uncertainty exists, data integration is of great importance, for which the fuzzy inference system and evidence theory are known as effective methods. Unavailability of experts’ opinion and the exponential growth of the number of required fuzzy rules associated with the risk factors are two drawbacks of fuzzy inference. Dempster–Shafer’s theory of evidence is one of the popular theories used in intelligent systems for modeling and reasoning under uncertainty and inaccuracy. In this paper, an evidential model for project environmental risk assessment is proposed based on the Dempster–Shafer theory, which is capable of taking into account the uncertainties. The proposed model is used to assess the environmental risks of Maroon oil pipelines in Isfahan. In addition, the proposed model is used in the case of tunneling risk assessment taken from the subject literature. To evaluate the validity of the proposed evidential model, the results are compared in two case studies, with the results of the conventional risk assessment method and the fuzzy inference system method. The comparative results show that the proposed model has a high potential for project risk assessment under an uncertain environment.