Asian Journal of Information Technology

Year: 2011
Volume: 10
Issue: 3
Page No. 122 - 128

An Efficient Modelling to Generate Alternatives Approach for Addressing Unmodelled Issues and Objectives in Public Environmental Planning

Authors : Julian Scott Yeomans and Yavuz Gunalay

Abstract: Public sector decision making typically involves complex problems that are riddled with competing performance objectives and possess design requirements which are difficult to capture at the time that supporting decision models are constructed. Environmental policy formulation can prove additionally complicated because the various system components often contain considerable stochastic uncertainty and frequently there are also numerous stakeholders holding incompatible perspectives. Consequently, there are invariably unmodelled performance design issues not apparent at the time of the problem formulation which can greatly impact the acceptability of any proposed solutions. While a mathematically optimal solution might provide the best solution to a modelled problem, normally this will not be the best solution to the underlying real problem. Therefore, in public environmental policy formulation, it is generally preferable to be able to create several quantifiably good alternatives that provide very different approaches and perspectives to the problem. This study shows how Simulation-Optimization (SO) modelling can be combined with niching operators to efficiently generate multiple policy alternatives that satisfy required system performance criteria in stochastically uncertain environments and yet are maximally different from each other in the decision space. This new stochastic approach is very computationally efficient, since it permits the simultaneous generation of good solution alternatives in a single computational run of the SO algorithm. The efficacy and efficiency of this modelling to generate alternatives method is specifically demonstrated using a waste management case from the Municipality of Hamilton-Wentworth, Ontario.

How to cite this article:

Julian Scott Yeomans and Yavuz Gunalay, 2011. An Efficient Modelling to Generate Alternatives Approach for Addressing Unmodelled Issues and Objectives in Public Environmental Planning. Asian Journal of Information Technology, 10: 122-128.

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