Data reconciliation under fuzzy constraints applied to wood flows in Austria

Abstract

Material flow analysis deals with gathering, harmonizing, and analyzing data about physical flows and stocks from different sources with varying quality in order to quantify the material turnover of a defined system. As data availability and quality is limited, there is uncertainty that the available data represent the actual value of interest. In the present study this degree of belief is expressed via fuzzy sets, which specify the possible range of values of the input data. The input data are forced to comply with the mass balance constraints given by the material flow model. As a result, possible ranges are calculated for each flow and consistency levels are determined to identify flows which are in good agreement with the model and flows which are hardly consistent. The method is illustrated using a sub-system of the Austrian wood flow model as a case study.