Fuzzy Description of Air Quality: A Case Study

The methods suggested by US -EPA for computation of air quality indices do not include expert's knowledge. There exists aleotary uncertainty in the pollution parametric data and the epistemic uncertainty in describing the pollutants by the domain experts in linguistic terms such as good, very good, etc. Fuzzy logic based formalism presented in this paper can model two types of uncertainties, and finally straightway describe air quality in linguistic terms with a degree of certainty attached to each term. The case study relates to the assessment of the status of ambient air quality in Pune city at the defined air quality monitoring stations, using fuzzy logic based formalism. The comparison of the results obtained using the conventional method of computing air quality index and the proposed fuzzy logic based method is an integral part of the paper.