Formation of an air pollution index

An air pollution index is a quantitative tool through which air pollution d ata can be reported uniformly. There have been efforts to describe overall air pollution by an aggregation of pollutant subindices. When ambiguous, th ese aggregations raise unnecessary alarm by declaring a less polluted air t o be highly polluted. Similarly when eclipsed, a false sense of security is provided by indicating highly polluted air as less polluted. Linear sum an d root sum square forms in vogue suffer from ambiguity. Whereas the maximum operator aggregation does not consider change in the remaining pollutants, it is not a good tool for management purposes. In this paper, an ambiguity - and eclipsicity-free function has been presented for aggregation of air p ollution subindices. For computer adaptation of the aggregation process, th e subindices have been expressed as full range functions of the pollutant c oncentrations.