Determination of the level of environment comfort using ordinal scales

Abstract

To determine the degree of ecological environment comfort many indicators, such as bioclimatic indicators, temperature, humidity, seismicity, bogs, the ability of the soil and waterways to cleanse itself, the presence of blood-sucking insects, are used. The scale is set for each of the indicator to compare the individual regions on the basis of a number of quantitative indicators. The generalized (integrated) measure of comfort can be used in evaluating the joint action of various factors that degrade the ecological environment in addition to conventional values or individual levels. The generalized comfort index is defined by using values or performance levels of individual comfort considering weight factors or informativity coefficients.Very often integral indicator of comfort is defined as the average ratings of certain parameters. But this definition is associated with the following disadvantages. Firstly, the scale of the integral index is discrete-verbal numerical scale and there is no way to decide at intermediate values of the integral index with different combinations of ingredients. Secondly, the scale of the integral index is conditional numerical scale, i.e. the level of comfort in scores determined arbitrarily, as some indicators show ordinal properties and are distributed only equivalence relation and order. Therefore, aggregation of such indicators in the integral index operator must be intended only for ordinal values, i.e. algebraic summation can not be used. The paper presents the ways of aggregating of the ecological environment individual comfort indicators in the integral index, due to which a decision on the general level of environmental comfort using the scale with fuzzy linguistic variables is taken.Considering the bioclimatic comfort ordinal scales in order to improve the accuracy of the generalized level of bioclimatic comfort, the use of carrier aggregation suggested - median secondary Walsh was proposed in the paper. For the final decision at various combinations of individual comfort indicators the scale with fuzzy linguistic variables is used.