Strategic Environmental Assessment is a procedure aimed at introducing systematic assessment of the environmental effects of plans and programs. This procedure is based on the so-called coaxial matrices that define dependencies between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions, buildings, etc.) and positive and negative environmental impacts, and dependencies between these impacts and environmental receptors. Up to now, this procedure is manually implemented by environmental experts for checking the environmental effects of a given plan or program, but it is never applied during the plan/program construction. A decision support system, based on a clear logic semantics, would be an invaluable tool not only in assessing a single, already defined plan, but also during the planning process in order to produce an optimized, environmentally assessed plan and to study possible alternative scenarios. We propose two logic-based approaches to the problem, one based on Constraint Logic Programming and one on Probabilistic Logic Programming that could be, in the future, conveniently merged to exploit the advantages of both. We test the proposed approaches on a real energy plan and we discuss their limitations and advantages.

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Biomass power plants are very promising for reducing carbon oxides emissions, because they provide energy\ud with a carbon-neutral process. Biomass comes from trees and vegetables, so they provide a renewable type\ud of energy. However, biomass plants location, along with their provisioning basins, are heavily regulated by\ud economical aspects, often without careful consideration of their environmental footprint. For example, some\ud Italian biomass plants import from overseas palm-tree oil that is economically convenient. However, the\ud energy consumed for the oil transportation is definitely greater than the energy produced by the palm-tree\ud oil burning. In this way biomass power plants turn out to be environmentally inefficient, even if they produce\ud renewable energy.\ud We propose an Integer Linear Programming approach for defining the energy and cost-efficient biomass\ud plant location along with the corresponding provisioning basin. In addition, the model enables to evaluate\ud existing plants and their energy and cost efficiency. Our study is based on real data gathered in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.\ud Finally, this optimization tool is just a small part of a wider perspective that is aimed to define decision\ud support tools for the improvement of regional planning and its precise strategic environmental assessment

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is used to evaluate the environmental effects of regional plans and programs.\ud SEA expresses dependencies between plan activities (infrastructures, plants, resource extractions, buildings, etc.) and environmental pressures, and between these and environmental receptors.\ud In this paper we employ fuzzy logic and many-valued logics together with numeric transformations for performing SEA. In particular, we discuss four models that \ud capture alternative interpretations of the dependencies, combining quantitative and qualitative information.\ud We have tested the four models and presented the results to the expert for validation. \ud The interpretability of the results of the models was appreciated by the expert that liked in particular those models returning a possibility distribution in place of a crisp result

Modeling the policy making process is a very challenging task. To the best of our knowledge the most widely used technique in this setting is agent-based simulation. Each agent represents an individual entity (e.g., citizen, stakeholder, company, public association, public body). The agent interaction enables emerging behaviours to be observed and taken into account in the policy making process itself. We claim that another perspective should be considered in modeling policy issues, that is the global perspective. Each public body has global objectives, constraints and guidelines that have to be combined to take decisions. The policy making process should be at the same time consistent with constraints, optimal with respect to given objectives and assessed to avoid negative impacts on the environment, economy and society. We propose in this paper a constraint-based model for the global policy making process and we apply the devised model to the regional planning activity. A case study in the field of energy plan is used to evaluate the proposed model. Clearly an interaction with agent-based simulation is desirable and could provide important feedback to the global model. This aspect is the subject of current research. 93 activities, 29 negative impacts, 19 positive impacts and 23 receptors, and assess 11 types of plans.