Recent environmental studies have revealed the precarious situation of certain population centres near to rubbish tips and dumps. The new guidelines imposed by the European Union have given raise to the development of a Spanish regulation, in which an environmental diagnose of all the tips of urban solid waste and dumps. According to such regulation, the authorities must proceed to their conditioning or, if it is necessary, the closing, sealing and rehabilitation of the environment of the area. Often, the proper Administrations do not have means to get, in a fast and economical way, the data relating to the environmental questions of rubbish tips. The design of a methodology that allows to carry out an environmental diagnose of rubbish tips would be the basic support tool for this work. The need of solving the environmental questions that arise in certain city centres and the concern for homogenizing the exigencies in the technical reports on the environmental impact are the point of reference for the development of an Intelligent System, able to analyse and guide in the conditioning works.
Tips´ quality control
The aim of the project is to implement the environmental diagnose methods in an Intelligent System using flexible computer tools (soft computing) and fuzzy logic. Through this mechanism, we can use simultaneously in a coherent and rigorous way qualitative and quantitative information and provide an appropriate conceptual framework for the use of uncertainty and vagueness. Besides, the system includes the possibility of analysing automatically the necessary corrections for environmental impact to maintain within the appropriate limits. The coordination of the research works has been possible thanks to the starting of two subprojects, one to develop the new methodology, whose main researcher is doctor Montserrat Zamorano Toro, and other to develop the intelligent system, whose main researcher is doctor Ignacio Requena Ramos, who also coordinates the whole project. It is a multidisciplinary project, and therefore it is necessary to count on the collaboration of experts on the fields of Environment Technology, who provide knowledge on the variables and elements of the affected environment, and experts on Computer Sciences, who study the methodology to implement them in a computer model adapted to the new information technologies.
The geographic implementation ambit of this methodology, through the implemented intelligent system, can include the countries on the European Union, as well as all those places where there are similar rules, no rules at all or, if there are, they must be less restrictive than the Directive 31/99.
Among the members of the team there are researchers of the Universities of Almería and Granada belong to different Research Groups (Andalusian Council) on Approximate Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence or on Microbiology and Environmental Techniques. The project has also counted on the collaboration of the professor and doctor of Computing of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá Óscar Germán Duarte Velasco, and researchers of the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile).
Referencia
Professor Begoña Moreno Escobar. Department of Civil Engineering
Phone number. 958 249 458. E-mail. bgmoreno@ugr.es
Professor Montserrat Zamorano Toro. Department of Civil Engineering. Water Institute
Phone number. 958 249 462. Mobile 605 644 994. E-mail. zamorano@ugr.es
