TY  - JOUR
T1  - An Efficient Modelling to Generate Alternatives Approach for Addressing Unmodelled Issues and Objectives in Public Environmental Planning
AU - Gunalay, Yavuz AU - Yeomans, Julian Scott 
JO  - Asian Journal of Information Technology
VL  - 10
IS  - 3
SP  - 122
EP  - 128
PY  - 2011
DA  - 2001/08/19
SN  - 1682-3915
DO  - ajit.2011.122.128
UR  - https://makhillpublications.co/view-article.php?doi=ajit.2011.122.128
KW  - Canada
KW  -solution
KW  -Modelling to generate alternatives
KW  -simulation-optimization
KW  -Turkey
KW  -public
AB  - 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.
ER  -