Environmental Informatics for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives

Abstract

Environmental informatics has experienced extraordinarily rapid progress in the past decade and has made an invaluable contribution to planning, design, and operations for waste management. In many cases, however, the roles of these information technologies have been limited to stand-alone projects without synergistic effects. This article presents a holistic view and an in-depth discussion of environmental informatics applied to solid and hazardous waste management from the onset to the present status, and to future trends aiming to advance the management potential. With regard to building, maintaining, and developing knowledge-based or artificial intelligence systems, the spectrum of environmental informatics for solid and hazardous waste management can be classified into five categories: database system, geographical information system, decision support system, expert system, and integrated environmental information system. Supporting technologies in the integrated environmental information system can be further divided into five classes in a logical order to enhance understanding: data acquisition, data communication, data and knowledge storage, data mining and knowledge discovery, and data and knowledge utilization. This critical review article may help create sustainable development strategies from a local solution to global opportunities that will elevate environmental informatics to a new level in dealing with more complex problems and large-scale applications for integrated solid and hazardous waste management.

KEY WORDS:

• data mining
• decision-making
• environmental informatics
• integrated solid waste management
• Internet of Things
• knowledge engineering
• sensors and sensing systems

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by National Key Technology R&D Program in China (2006BAC06B02-04) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China (2010ZZ004-01).