The aim of this work is the
development of a fuzzy exposure mo
del to estimate the radiation exposure of a population living in an area containing consi
derable amounts of natural uranium. A Mamdani-type fuzzy mo
del was created from expert's opinion, consi
dering the following main factors: body weight, food consumption rate, lifetime and exposure duration, uranium activity concentration and food diet fraction for exposed individuals. The output fuzzy sets were expressed in form of linguistic variables, such as “low”, “medium” and “high”. The fuzzy synthetic evaluation technique was also applied since this method is consi
dered well suited for this type of application. The daily average ingestion (DAI) was then obtained for both mo
dels and converted to average daily dose (ADD).
A third approach based on Monte Carlo method was employed to calculate DAI and ADD, generating probabilistic distributions of input data, allowing a better comparison between the above techniques.
In the qualitative analysis, the linguistic variable obtained was satisfactory according to the expert's opinions. In the quantitative analysis, the obtained fuzzy values showed a good agreement with that calculated by Monte Carlo method, and confirmed the results of the qualitative analysis. The global results suggest that these types of fuzzy models are highly promising for exposure evaluation to ionizing radiation.