Environmental systems analysis under uncertainty

摘要

Systems analysis is a crucial measure to support the management of complex environments (Yin et al. 1999, Huang and Xia 2001, Olsen et al. 2006, Qin et al. 2006, Wang 2007). Studies of environmental systems analysis are associated with sophisticated analytical capabilities and mul-tidisciplinary modelling skills to provide risk-informed, consensus-oriented, and cost-effective solutions to a variety of real-world problems (Zeng et al. 2003, 2004, Maqsood et al. 2004, Xi et al. 2004, Qin et al. 2007a, b). Among the complexities in environmental systems analysis, the existence of uncertainties is of major concern, leading to a number of challenges in characterising a mixture of intertwined parameters and their interactions, projecting dynamic system performance, identifying desired decision schemes and delineating risks derived from various randomness and fuzziness (Huang et al. 1995, Wu et al. 1997, Huang 1998, Huang and Chang 2003, Qin et al. 2004, Qin et al. 2007c, d). To tackle these challenges, it is critical to integrate a variety of simulation, optimisation and statistical techniques with state-of-the-art uncertainty-analysis methods to support a more robust environmental systems analysis (Briggs 1995, Fenz et al. 1998, Vijayan et al. 1999).