Regional Environmental Assessment and Industril Reallocation in the Greater Osaka Area

Abstract

In this paper we are concerned with examining some of the methodologies based on utility approach for evaluating environmental systems planning, introducing a new, alternative device to them, and presenting a demonstration of its application to environmental problems in the industrialized greater Osaka area.This paper is composed of three topics. First, the main concepts of the utility approach are briefly reviewed and examined from the point of view of multiobjective systems analysis, and some defects of this approach are considered. Second, a new method which we call the Nested Lagrangian Multiplier Method (or NLM method) is introduced and compared with conventional utility approaches, and theoretical background of it are scrutinized. Third, a demonstration of its use in environmental systems planning in the greater Osaka area is presented. Finally, it is recalled that utilization of optimization methods for comprehensive economic plannings would simultaneously provide optimal solutions for allocation as well as evaluation problems based on duality of mathematical programming.