ABSTRACT
The objective of the present chapter is to obtain the weights of the criteria that have influence in an emerging decision problem such as preserving the natural habitats and wild fauna and flora of protected areas. This problem consists on the prioritization of areas located in the Natura 2000 network to carry out environmental actions based on a set of criteria. The information provided by the criteria is of different nature, with quantitative criteria (distance to settlements, main roads, crops, etc.) coexisting with qualitative criteria (desertification risk and level of protection). Therefore, linguistic labels and numerical values are employed to obtain the importance coefficients of the criteria. In order to compare different models for extracting the knowledge based on heterogeneous and homogeneous aggregations, a survey focusing on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology will be elaborated and submitted to experts in this specific field. In this way, it will be possible to obtain the weights of the considered criteria for further evaluation of the alternatives.
