Assessment of the environmental comfort of lactating sows via improved analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation

Since there are many interacting influence factors of the comfortable degree of lactating sows, a method that combines improved analytic hierarchy process (IAHP) and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) was introduced to conduct a quantitative evaluation of the comfortable degree. Besides, an evaluation index system was established, and the weights of different indicators were determined by using IAHP method, including temperature, relative humidity, concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), ammonia (NH3), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and air speed. The construction method of fuzzy membership function and the calculation method of the parameters were proposed following the principle that the summation of membership degrees is equal to 1. Three basic types of membership functions (MFs), i.e., ridgemf, gaussmf, and trimf were used to build an evaluation model which fitted IAHP-FCE well. The proposed method was verified and applied based on the environmental data in different seasons obtained from a pig farm in Zhenjiang City, Jiangsu Province, China. It is demonstrated that the proposed IAHP-FCE model with various types of MFs has drawn a unique and consistent conclusion. Moreover, the IAHP-FCE model has a higher correlation coefficient of 0.874 compared with the single-factor evaluation (SFE) model. The IAHP-FCE model could be served as a beneficial strategy for the precise regulation and early warning of environmental conditions to improve sow welfare.