A new method for mining area ecological environment assessment based on credibility measure.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a more objective evaluation method for a mining area ecological environment. It proposes the weight of indices with respect to the total goal, and provides a new evaluation method which generalizes the weighted-average method. Design/methodology/approach – First, the authors describe the evaluation grades by fuzzy variables in credibility space, and the degree of an index belonging to a grade is transformed to be the credibility measure of a fuzzy event by the credibility inversion theorem. Second, a new algorithm which generalizes the weighted-average method is proposed to realize the transformation from the credibility degree of the underlying indices to the credibility degree of the total target. Findings – The method proposed in this paper can obtain the correct results illustrated with a numerical evaluation example. The comparison with two other methods shows that the proposed method has stronger classification ability. Originality/value – The new method presented in this paper generalizes the weighted-average method, and provides methods for other evaluation systems with a hierarchical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]