Fuzzy Logic-Based Environmental Criteria in Engineering Design

Abstract

The environment has become one of the most important issues facing all of the population of this planet. It is everyone’s responsibility to minimize the destructive effect they have upon the environment. It is especially important that design engineers attempt to minimize the effect their products have upon the environment. But, it is very difficult for engineers to foresee all of the consequences that their designs may have. Many times, the information needed to complete such an analysis is beyond the engineer’s expertise and is often unquantifiable and overwhelming. A solution to this problem comes in the form of an environmental impact evaluating expert system which can evaluate designs and determine if there may be undesirable environmentally-threatening consequences from the design. This expert system will be based upon a fuzzy logic inference engine. Fuzzy logic is being used because the types of rules used in environmental evaluation are more amenable to fuzzy logic representation than standard Boolean logic. In the test case examined in this paper, it is shown that this methodology is valid at least in a very basic implementation.