Multi-Criteria Optimal Planning for Energy Policies in CLP

In the policy making process a number of disparate and diverse issues such as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy, need to be considered. A single person might not have all the required expertises, and decision support systems featuring optimization components can help to assess policies. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare them. Each plan is environmentally assessed and its footprint is evaluated. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces, and an intuitive graphic user interface.Comment: Accepted at ICLP2014 Conference as Technical Communication, due to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

An Application of Fuzzy Logic to Strategic Environmental Assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is used to evaluate the environmental effects of regional plans and programs. SEA expresses dependencies between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions, buildings, etc.) and environmental pressures, and between these and environmental receptors. In this paper we employ fuzzy logic and many-valued logics together with numeric transformations for performing SEA. In particular, we discuss four models that capture alternative interpretations of the dependencies, combining quantitative and qualitative information. We have tested the four models and presented the results to the expert for validation. The interpretability of the results of the models was appreciated by the expert that liked in particular those models returning a possibility distribution in place of a crisp result