Fuzzy Logic Modelling of Traffic Light

Indicators: DFO Report 30 March 2001

William Silvert, Senior Research Fellow
Instituto de Investigação das Pescas e do Mar
Departamento de Ambiente Aquático
Avenida de Brasília, s/n
1449-006 Lisboa, PORTUGAL

E-mail: silvert@ipimar.pt

Preface
This is the final report for project F5245-000543, “Fuzzy Logic Modelling of
Traffic Light Indicators”. The original intent of this project was to address some of the
problems evident in application of the standard Traffic Light Method to fisheries
management by incorporating aspects of fuzzy set theory. To do this effectively
required developing an overall picture of the fisheries management process and
exploring and defining the areas where the Traffic Light Method or similar techniques
could be used.
This process led to two preliminary parts of this report, an overview of fisheries
management in terms of information flow, and a general analysis of the applicability
of graphical techniques to simplify the process.
The main part of the report deals with the development of a Fuzzy Traffic Light
Method which retains the clarity of the standard Traffic Light Method while resolving
difficulties that have been encountered with it.

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Table of Contents
Preface........................................................................................................................1
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................2
Introduction................................................................................................................3
Information Flow in Fisheries Management..............................................................3
What’s in the Box?.................................................................................................4
Hierarchical Structure ............................................................................................5
Graphical Representations .........................................................................................6
What is there to Represent? ...................................................................................6
How do Characteristics Depend on Indicators?.....................................................7
Redefining Indicators.............................................................................................9
Useful Properties of a GRSI ................................................................................10
Traffic Lights and Alternatives ................................................................................10
The Standard Traffic Light Method .....................................................................11
The Fuzzy Traffic Light Method .........................................................................12
The Connection between Traffic Lights and Set Theory.....................................13
Implementation of Fuzzy Traffic Lights..............................................................14
How Many Colours? ............................................................................................17
Common Currency...............................................................................................18
Showing Several Indicators at Once ....................................................................19
More about Yellow Lights ...................................................................................22
Pre-emptive Indicators .........................................................................................23
Linear and Non-linear Indicators .........................................................................24
Combination of Indicators ...................................................................................26
Defuzzification.....................................................................................................27
Quantification of Uncertainty ..............................................................................28
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................28
References (Annotated) ...........................................................................................29
Appendix I – Algorithms and Mathematical Formulae ...........................................30
Specifications.......................................................................................................30
Terminology.........................................................................................................30
Defuzzification.....................................................................................................30
Constrained Fuzzification ....................................................................................30
Integration ............................................................................................................31
Summary ..............................................................................................................31
Appendix II – Representations.................................................................................32
Appendix III – Code Samples..................................................................................33
Appendix IV – Programs .........................................................................................34
Appendix V – Visual Basic Source Code ................................................................35

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Introduction
There is a recognised need to simplify and clarify the information used in fisheries
management. The data available are so voluminous and in some cases so esoteric that
it is not possible to assimilate and analyse them effectively, especially given the time
constraints that many fisheries managers face. Furthermore, fisheries concern
different groups of people with different backgrounds and various levels of scientific
sophistication. Consequently there is interest in finding simplified ways to represent
data in a way that can easily be grasped but which preserves the original information
without bias. One approach is to use a familiar pictorial representation to express in
information in a way that all users recognise.
The Traffic Light Method is one such implementation, based on the idea that
almost everyone in our society immediately recognises the significance of red, yellow
and green lights. It thus has the immediate advantage that information presented in the
form of traffic lights is easily interpreted and understood by all interested parties.
There are however drawbacks to the Traffic Light Method as originally developed,
and this project is an attempt to resolve these drawbacks while retaining the basic
simplicity and clarity of the method.
Information Flow in Fisheries Management
Fisheries management science can be thought of as a sort of “black box” for
processing information, where the inputs are masses of biological, environmental and
economic data, and the output is advice to management. The workings of the black
box are extremely complicated, and to make matters worse, it constantly being
redesigned. There is a need to standardise the design of the process to make it more
efficient, transparent and flexible. The first step in doing this is to find a way to
describe the inner workings in a simplified modular way.
The crudest representation of the process is shown in Figure 1, showing the flow of
information from raw data through the advisory process.

Advice to Management

Scientific Analysis

Raw Data Raw Data Raw Data Raw Data

Figure 1. The “black box” picture of fisheries management science

In practice however the quantity of raw data is usually overwhelming and the process
of scientific analysis gets broken into two parts, as shown in Figure 2:

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 Advice to Management

Consultative Process

Comparison & Integration

Indicators Indicators

Raw Data Raw Data Raw Data Raw Data

Figure 2. A “black box” picture of fisheries management with a distinction

between raw data and indicators as input

Here the process of scientific analysis has been broken into two parts; first the
assimilation and interpretation of raw data to provide meaningful indicators of the
quantities that the data measure, and second the comparison and integration of these
indicators to understand their implications for fisheries management. The output of
this analysis provides the input to the consultative process which provides advice to
management.
Estimation of biomass from research vessel (RV) surveys is a good example of the
relationship between raw data and indicators. The raw data include many technical
details, such as randomisation parameters and cable angles, that are relevant to the
analysis but which can be set aside once the objective of the RV survey, namely
estimation of the biomass, has been achieved. It is this biomass estimate, and not the
raw data which produced it, that is the input to the consultative process.

What’s in the Box?

The next step in understanding the advisory system is to look inside the black box
labelled “Comparison & Integration” in Figure 2. What one expects to see is an
information network similar to the one shown in Figure 3 (this is a generic spaghetti
diagram) with information flows between nodes at which information is combined,
compared, and integrated. These nodes will be referred to as Characteristics in
keeping with previous usage in the Traffic Light Method, and (as if the figure were
not already complicated enough) additional arrows from the external indicators should
be included to represent the inputs.

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 Figure 3. A typical network diagram showing how information flows with both
positive and negative effects on the nodes (Characteristics)

Hierarchical Structure
The schema shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2 is basically hierarchical in structure,
and the consultative process itself is usually much more hierarchically ordered than
the mess in Figure 3. A more concrete example is shown in Figure 4, which is just an
excerpt from a hypothetical but realistic schema for managing fish stocks.
Advice to Management

Integrated Bioeconomic Overview

Biological Summary Economic Summary

Biological Factors Environment

Current Stock Recruitment

RV Surveys SPA

Research Missions

Figure 4. Section of a hierarchical system fisheries management

The lowest level represents the raw data input to an RV survey, and the output of the
survey itself is a biomass estimate which we refer to as an Indicator. This can be
evaluated in conjunction with another Indicator, the SPA estimate of biomass, to
arrive at an estimate of the current stock size. This estimate is called a Characteristic,
and the information represented by the Characteristics is the working material for the
assessment process.
An estimator of stock size in conjunction with additional biological information on
production and recruitment (i.e., other Characteristics), enables us to summarise the
biological factors. These in turn are integrated with another set of Characteristics
describing environmental factors to arrive at a summary characterising the biological

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status of the stock. Thus the Characteristics represent intermediate stages where the
huge masses of input data are collated and condensed into useful measures of how the
system is functioning, and in some cases they can also be used as performance
measures to see how well management objectives are being achieved – this is
primarily true of biological Characteristics like stock size, which indicate how well
conservation policies are working, and less true of Characteristics which describe
environmental factors not subject to management control.
In some earlier work the picture drawn of the scientific process was simpler than
that shown in Figure 4, with one layer of Indicators leading to one layer of
Characteristics, and an Integrated Summary on top of that. However, this example
shows that there may be several layers of Characteristics, and that what may look like
a Summary to one group of scientists (in this case the Biological Summary) may
simply be input to a higher level of integration as seen by another group; in this case
the Biological Summary needs to be combined with the Economic Summary to give
an integrated bioeconomic overview that is the basis for advice to management.
The hierarchical model shown in Figure 4 is an idealised example, and in general
the complexity of the connections lies somewhere between the simple pattern of
Figure 4 and the mess shown in Figure 3. Some Indicator variables only feed into the
next level of Characteristics – for example, temperature is an important environmental
factor, but is usually taken into account in estimating the basic biological quantities
like production – while others remain important at all levels. Stock biomass provides
a good example, since it is a significant input to calculations of production and other
basic quantities, but even in the final stage of preparing advice to management it is
important to compare the recommended TACs to the actual biomasses available, so a
properly constructed spaghetti diagram would have arrows from the biomass to the
next biological level, and also to the much higher level TAC recommendation..
Graphical Representations
Because of the complexity of the consultative process, there is a search for tools to
make the analysis more transparent and easy to comprehend. The Traffic Light
Method is one of these, but this is just one of a number of techniques that can be
lumped together as Graphical Representations of Scientific Information (GRSI). It is
useful to look at the issue of GRSIs in general before focussing on the subject of this
report, the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method, since many of the advantages and
disadvantages of the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method are common to all GRSIs.

What is there to Represent?

In earlier implementations of the Traffic Light Method and related methods the
GRSI was applied to individual Indicators and Characteristics. This can lead to
complications, especially when we consider multi-species fisheries, where the same
Indicator may affect different stocks in different ways. For example, consider the two
Characteristics describing production of cod and shrimp as a function of three
Indicators, the two parent stocks and the temperature, as shown in Figure 5.

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 Cod production Shrimp production

Cod stock Shrimp stock

Temperature
Figure 5. Dependence of two Characteristics (production) on three Indicators

There is no problem assigning traffic lights or another GRSI to the individual parent
stocks, but the role of bottom temperature is different for cod and shrimp. Cod need
warmer water, above 2°C, while shrimp thrive in water cooler than 2°C (Paul
Fanning, pers. comm.). Thus in terms of the traffic light metaphor a red light for cod
would be green for shrimp, and vice versa. This shows that the GRSIs are not
associated with individual Indicators or Characteristics, but with the pathways that
connect them (i.e., with the traffic along the network of interactions, which seems
appropriate for traffic lights).
There are ways of getting around this, such as using duplicate Indicators (e.g., use
two Indicators to represent the bottom temperature, based on the same data but with
different GRSIs for the two stocks), but this seems like a cumbersome solution.
The same argument applies to Characteristics as well as indicators. The biomass of
a particular stock has different significance for the fishery on that stock than it does
for stocks that interact with it ecologically. Moderately high levels of cod stocks may
be green for the cod fishery, yellow for the seal populations, and red for capelin.

How do Characteristics Depend on Indicators?

Each Characteristic is a node in the network that integrates the inputs from
Indicators and other Characteristics. In general this process can be quite complex,
which makes the development of a GRSI difficult. At least three basic situations need
to be considered (for brevity the inputs are referred to as Indicators, although some
may be Characteristics):
• In the simplest case the Characteristic scales monotonically with the Indicator, so
that the higher the Indicator value, the better the status of the property that it
represents, and the better the prognosis for the fishery. These Indicators can be
referred to as “linear”, since although the term is not strictly applicable in a
mathematical sense, it is more familiar and clearer than the technical term
“monotonic”. For linear Indicators it may be possible to use statistical tools to
assign cut points or other objective determinants of the traffic lights, but this is not
necessarily the best approach.

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• Many Indicators are non-linear, in the sense that there is range of values which is
optimal, and values which are too high or too low are not. Temperature is clearly a
non-linear indicator, as are many other environmental variables. These can still be
represented by traffic lights or other GRSIs – optimal temperatures are green, very
high or low temperatures are red – but it is meaningless to try to assign lights on
the basis of whether the temperature or other non-linear Indicator is above or
below its mean value.
• There are also some Indicators that are important but must be considered in
conjunction with other Indicators to be meaningful. An example provided by Ram
Myers (pers. comm.) is age structure as an Indicator. Predominance of small fish
can indicate either strong recruitment or over-fishing of large fish. Taken by itself
the variable cannot be interpreted and assigned a traffic light or other GRSI, but in
conjunction with other data, such as fishing effort, it provides valuable and
meaningful information.
These differences between types of Indicators show that while traffic lights can
sometimes be used to characterise Indicators, this is not always possible, and there is
no general statistical procedure that can always be used to map Indicator inputs into
lights.
The distinction between linear and non-linear indicators is not a major issue, and it
is raised here only to show that attempts to assign values to Indicators on the basis of
statistical properties of time series may be misguided. However, Indicators that are
only meaningful when analysed in conjunction with other Indicators are more
significant in terms of the development of GRSIs, since it does not seem possible to
assign any kind of value to the individual Indicators. We can call such Indicators
“incomplete”, since they are not sufficient to provide useful information taken alone,
but in conjunction with other Indicators they are of value.
The price of fish is an example of an incomplete indicator, since although it is
obviously an important variable, it is impossible to assign value to it (bad or good, red
or green) without taking into account additional variables such as supply, demand,
and the cost of fuel and other factors of production.
Condition is another example of an incomplete indicator, since poor condition may
be either the result of unfavourable environmental conditions or a consequence of
overcrowding and density-dependent effects. The correct interpretation is crucial for
management decision-making, since if the fish are suffering from poor environmental
conditions it would be unwise to fish the stock heavily, but their condition is caused
by there being too many fish for a limited resource base, it would be advisable to
consider fishing down the stock.
It is not always clear whether an Indicator is complete, and on reviewing some of
the earlier applications of the Traffic Light Method in other fields it appears that some
Indicators may have been misinterpreted because of an eagerness to interpret
incomplete Indicators as complete. For example, Indicators are often used as indices
of social change, and one common Indicator is the percentage of women in various
sectors of the labour force. In some countries the fraction of women in certain
scientific fields is much higher than in Canada, which seems very progressive, except
that it turns out in many cases that those fields are so poorly paid that they are
condescendingly thought of as women’s work. Thus a green light or other GRSI

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assigned to a high employment rate for women may be misleading if the real reason is
that men have preferential access to more highly paid jobs.
It does not seem possible to use GRSIs, including traffic lights, to characterise
incomplete Indicators, since the value of the Characteristic depends on several
Indicators and it is meaningless to assign lights or any other sort of value to just one
of them. We can therefore divide Characteristics into two categories, those whose
inputs are complete Indicators, and which can therefore can be described with GRSIs,
and those which depend on incomplete Indicators – however, since the GRSIs are
associated with connections and not with individual Indicators or Characteristics, it is
possible for the output of a Characteristic (namely its input to another Characteristic)
to be represented by a GRSI even if is own inputs are not.

Redefining Indicators
Fortunately the definition of Indicators is fairly flexible, and by selecting the
appropriate definitions it is possible to use mainly complete ones. For example, the
number of fish and the parameters of the size distribution are all possible Indicators,
but if we multiply the number by the mean weight we get the biomass, which can be
treated as a complete Indicator. On the other hand, some of the other Indicators that
could be constructed from these data are incomplete since they are difficult to
interpret without additional information. The example provided by Ram Myers (pers.
comm.) mentioned above is that predominance of small fish can indicate either strong
recruitment or over-fishing of large fish. By itself the fraction of small fish in the
population cannot be interpreted and assigned a GRSI, but in conjunction with other
data, such as fishing effort, it becomes useful. Similarly, the net revenue from the
fishery is relatively complete in comparison to related Indicators such as the price of
fish, stock biomass, and cost of fuel. It is clearly important to select the Indicators
appropriately so that as many of them as possible are complete.
While it is quite simple to see that biomass is a better Indicator from this point of
view than either numbers or mean weight, identification of the best Indicators is not
always trivial. For example, consider the predatory impact of seals. Both numbers and
biomass of seals could be considered reasonable Indicators, but Brodie (1984) has
pointed out that metabolic demand scales allometrically as approximately the inverse
cube root of the weight, so that the demand for food should be the number of seals
times the mean value of weight to the 2/3 power, which turns out to be the total
surface area of the seal population! This is probably one of the odder Indicators that
has been proposed for fisheries management, but it illustrates the point that selection
of the right Indicators is an important part of the process.
Not all Indicators can be expressed in a complete form in the context of a
hierarchical management scheme. The cod glut of the 1970’s occurred at a time when
all the biological Indicators were highly favourable and the fish landings were so great
that the market could not absorb the supply, and prices plummeted. It is only when
biological factors like biomass are integrated with economic data on the elasticity of
demand, which of course occurs at the highest levels of the hierarchy, that the true
significance of the biological productivity for the fishery becomes apparent.

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Useful Properties of a GRSI
For a GRSI to be useful, it is desirable that it possess several key properties in
order to provide an effective representation of the complex data used in fisheries
management:
• Resolution
• Uncertainty
• Weighting
There is general agreement that the discrete nature of the standard Traffic Light
Method is too crude and discards potentially useful information, such as whether a
yellow light is almost red or almost green. The same problem arises with other
simplified representations, not all of which are GRSIs, such as the use of + and –
signs in Figure 3 or the use of the symbols √, ≈ and × to evaluate Quality of Life
indicators. There are many ways of avoiding this by introducing higher resolution into
the representation, such as the use of a spectrum of many more lights. The Fuzzy
Traffic Light Method uses illumination of more than one light at a time to represent
finer grades in the information, so that a yellow light that is almost red would be
represented by a large yellow and a smaller red light, and so on.
It is also important that the method used be able to represent uncertainty in the data
used for management, both due to sampling problems and to conflicting information.
This is especially true when two methods for providing the same information lead to
conflicting results, as when the RV and SPA estimates of biomass disagree.
Averaging methods tend to obscure such issues, but with fuzzy sets one has a good
method for identifying conflicts. For example, if the RV survey finds lots of fish that
are not supposed to be there if you believe the SPA, so that the RV indicator is green
and the SPA indicator is red, the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method lets us display both red
and green lights, whereas an averaging method would only show a yellow light that is
indistinguishable from what you would see if both RV and SPA estimates agreed that
the stock was marginal.
Weighting of indicators is crucial if the objectives of the program are to be met,
including considerations such as the inclusion of environmental and ecological
information, input from fishermen, etc. It is unlikely that a management scheme in
which the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) or scarcity of forage fish were considered
on an equal footing with RV surveys would ever be taken seriously, and if suggested
new indicators could not be introduced with low weightings, it is unlikely that they
would be included at all.
Traffic Lights and Alternatives
The focus of this project is the use of traffic lights, which are simply one kind of
GRSI. While standard traffic lights have many advantages, such as familiarity, clarity,
and ease of representation, they lack the three critical features described in the
preceding section.
• Resolution – the greatest defect in the traditional traffic light approach, and
the one that has generated the most criticism, is the discontinuity of the
sharp transitions from red to yellow and from yellow to green and the fact
that there are only three categories available.

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 • Uncertainty – the traditional traffic light approach does not provide any way
to represent uncertainty in the assessment process, whether due to
inaccuracies in the data or conflicts between Indicators.
• Weighting – there is no clear way to assign weights to traditional traffic
lights, which impedes any attempt to introduce new Indicator variables or
take into account variables which have limited influence.
Because of these limitations, a number of alternatives have been investigated. For
example, the discontinuity of standard traffic lights can be mitigated by using more
colours (e.g., introducing an orange light between red and yellow) or even a
continuous spectrum. Weighting can be represented by changing the size of the lights.
Most of these alternative approaches are based on some sort of averaging
procedure and represent a mean status indicator. It is difficult to represent uncertainty
in this way, and an alternative approach is to weight each Indicator inversely to the
variance of the data on which it is based. This sort of ad hoc methodology can lead to
confusing paradoxes, where an important Indicator is assigned a low weight because
of measurement errors while a tentative or unimportant Indicator can have a much
higher weight. It is preferable to use a GRSI with enough flexibility to distinguish
between uncertainty and weight.

The Standard Traffic Light Method

The Traffic Light Method is an elegant way of presenting complex data in a
graphical and easily understood form, but by requiring that all indicators be
represented by one of only three discrete “lights” it suffers from a significant loss of
potential information. It is not clear whether a yellow light is “almost green” or
“almost red” for example, or whether a red light means that a stock is likely to recover
after a short suspension of fishing, or whether it is on the verge of extinction.
The greatest weakness of the standard Traffic Light Method is that it is discrete,
and offers only three distinct ways of characterising each indicator. As the Methods
Workbook and the report of the September workshop show, setting the threshold
values is difficult and can lead to controversy, and there is considerable reluctance
about the idea of converting continuous variables into a small number of discrete
categories. This has the potential to become a very serious problem if, for example, a
number of indicators fall just below the threshold value and the result is a yellow
light, when changing an arbitrary parameter value from 60% to 58% might give the
industry a green light. Another disadvantage discussed in the September report is the
difficulty of representing uncertainty, i.e., distinguishing between a yellow light
obtained by integrating a lot of yellow lights and one that represents equal numbers of
red, green and yellow lights.
The challenge addressed by this project is to preserve the benefits of the Traffic
Light Method while avoiding its disadvantages. The solution proposed here is to use
Fuzzy Set Theory to provide a simple generalisation of the Traffic Light Method
which retains all of the information in the original data but presents it in a way as
similar to that in the standard Traffic Light Method as possible.

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The Fuzzy Traffic Light Method
Light bulbs are usually either on or off, and traffic lights are designed so that
only one bulb is lit at any time (this is not strictly true, some traffic lights include
special turn lights, and in Europe it is common to show both red and yellow lights
together, but the Traffic Light Method refers to the basic common traffic light). It is
however possible to turn lights on and off gradually with the use of a dimmer switch,
so any degree of illumination is theoretically possible. The Fuzzy Traffic Light
Method is based on simply extending the concept of the traffic light by allowing for
different degrees of illumination of the bulbs, and allowing for more than one bulb to
be partially lit at the same time.
If we think about the electricity which flows through a traffic light, the current
is always the same, but it gets switched between the three bulbs and flows through
only one of them at a time. A fuzzy traffic light also maintains a constant current, but
it can flow through more than one bulb simultaneously. Thus if we think of a light
going from green to yellow, instead of suddenly switching from all green to all
yellow, we would instead see the green fade away to darkness while the yellow bulb
gradually comes on. This could easily be implemented with real lights, but since it is
difficult to represent different degrees of illumination on paper, there are alternate
representations that are preferable. Still, the basic idea is to represent the data by a
combination of red, yellow and green shapes analogous to a traffic light.
The Traffic Light Method is basically a binning technique, where a continuous
or multi-variate representation of data is converted into a discrete classification.
Typically a variable like stock size is “binned” into one of three categories, Red,
Yellow or Green. In principle there can be any number of bins, but since the Traffic
Light Method is based on analogy to traffic lights, it usually uses three bins, although
it is possible to implement it with just two lights. Binning is common in scientific
work, both in experimental equipment – multi-channel analysers such as Coulter
counters are based on binning – and in theoretical analysis using histograms. The
Traffic Light Method uses binning as a way of simplifying and clarifying complex
information for decision-making purposes.
The Fuzzy Traffic Light Method is a simple generalisation that permits the data
to be divided and split between two or more bins. Thus instead of having to assign a
particular Indicator value to the red bin or to the yellow bin, it is possible to put half
of it in each bin. And that is basically all there is to the fuzzy approach.
A fuzzy representation with two lamps, red and green, is feasible, and can
provide more information than the standard traffic light with three lamps. A yellow
lamp corresponds to a mixture of red and green, and by varying the ratio of red to
green it is possible to recover the original Indicator value. However, when only two
colours are used, there is not enough flexibility to provide information about
uncertainty. This will be discussed later in the report.
Both two-colour and three-colour versions of the traffic light approach have
value in environmental analyses, and it is not always necessary to use a yellow light.
The advantage of the yellow light is that it can be used to indicate marginal
conditions, which may not always be appropriate – for example, when a regulatory
criterion must be met, the light is either red or green, never yellow.

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The Connection between Traffic Lights and Set Theory
The standard Traffic Light Method can be formulated in terms of set theory, since
assigning a light to a range of Indicator values is equivalent to saying that those values
fall in a particular set – for example, when the biomass values are low, the stock size
belongs to the set of “red” stock sizes. The difference between a regular set (known as
a “crisp” set) and a fuzzy set is simply that things either are or are not in a crisp set,
but with fuzzy sets it is possible to be only a partial member of the set, and to belong
to two or more apparently mutually exclusive sets at the same time.
The language which we use in fuzzy set theory is based on the idea of
membership in a set, namely the degree to which a variable can be assigned to a
particular set. The concepts of description and classification are based on the use of
sets, although we tend not to use the language of set theory, and when we make a
statement in ordinary language such as “Socrates is a man” we are simply putting into
common terms the mathematical statement that Socrates is a member of the set of all
men. Since we usually classify people as either men or women, it seems redundant to
add that Socrates is 100% a man, but if we consider other kinds of descriptive
statements such as “Socrates is short”, then it becomes harder to draw a line between
who is tall and who is short, and we are likely to say that “Socrates is somewhat
short”, which can be expressed in the language of fuzzy set theory by stating that
Socrates is 70% a member of the set “short”. In other words, the use of fuzzy sets is
simply a mathematical way of expressing the uncertainty and ambiguity that are
present in ordinary language.
Membership in a set is usually represented by the symbol µ (Greek mu) and
takes values between zero and one, or 0 and 100%. Thus the statement “Socrates is a
man” is equivalent to saying that Socrates is 100% a member of the set of all men,
µmen=1, while the statement that “Socrates is somewhat short” is represented by
µshort=0.7.
It is important to recognise that the power of fuzzy set theory lies not in its
mathematical sophistication, but in the way that it reflects the way that we think. The
distinctions that people perceive, whether between a healthy and a sick child or
between a robust and an endangered fish stock, are not sharply defined. By using
fuzzy logic to categorise these distinctions we are not so much introducing new
mathematics as we are forcing the mathematics we use to reflect the way we think,
rather than drawing artificial and unnatural distinctions to fit the requirements of the
mathematics.
In fisheries management it is clear that sharp distinctions are difficult to make,
and even given perfect data there would always be room for disagreement over
significance and interpretation. This is the kind of problem that fuzzy set theory can
best address. While it would be nice to be able to say that fishing must stop, i.e., the
fishery must be given a red light as soon as the stock size falls below 42,342 tonnes,
this kind of precision is impossible.
In a sense the fact that three lights do not provide sufficient resolution is by
itself a crude commitment to fuzzy representation, since a yellow light really means
that we cannot decide whether conditions should be red or green, so we need a way to
express compromise. If fisheries management were an exact science, it would not be
necessary to seek a representation with higher resolution. In cases where a
Characteristic corresponds to a management objective, we could simply use red to

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identify levels worse than some cut-off point, green for levels better than the
designated target level, and yellow for values that exceed the cut-off but don’t meet
the target.
To elaborate on the issue of resolution, consider the traffic light representation
of a single indicator, stock size. Imagine that there is general agreement that if the
stock falls below 40 kt there is a serious problem and fishing should be stopped, and
that if the level is over 50 kt the stock is healthy and can support fishing, but in the
intermediate range there is no clear consensus about what to do. Some experts feel
that at 45 kt the fishery should be closed, others feel that it is safe to open it.
One can clearly represent stock sizes below 40 kt by a red light and those above
50 kt by a green light, but the intermediate values are problematical. The standard
traffic light method would just use a yellow light, but having a single colour
representation of the range between 40 and 50 kt does not really convey the degree of
uncertainty that exists for different stock sizes. There would be no distinction between
41 kt and 49 kt for example.
By using a fuzzy set representation of the traffic lights we can provide a clearer
indication of the presence or lack of consensus even if we do not use the yellow light,
by assigning different memberships in the colour sets. We could characterise 41 kt as
90% red and 10% green for example, while 49 kt would be 10% red and 90% green.
But by including the yellow light we can convey even more information about the
interpretation of the data while still maintaining a simple three-colour representation.
Suppose that we have ten experts involved in stock assessment, and they cannot
agree on whether to permit fishing at the 45 kt level. If they are divided right down
the middle, 5 say yes and 5 say no, then we can represent this by a light that is 50%
red and 50% green. But if 6 of them simply do not know what to say and the rest are
evenly divided, then the light would be 20% red, 20% green, and 60% yellow –
perhaps no easier for a decision-maker to deal with, but at least the state of expert
opinion is clearer.
Although this discussion has focussed on the area that the standard Traffic Light
Method classifies as yellow, there are similar issues in the red and green zones. All of
these are matters of degree, and there is a significant difference between a stock that is
adequate to withstand fishing and one that is so vast that it conforms to the old myth
that "Probably all the great sea fisheries are inexhaustible." (Sir Thomas Huxley, 1884
– exact reference unknown). These distinctions cannot be expressed with the standard
Traffic Light Method, but with the fuzzy approach one can distinguish between
shades of green by varying the memberships and including a bit of yellow.

Implementation of Fuzzy Traffic Lights

The three fuzzy sets in the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method are represented by three
colours of lamps, and can be described verbally as:
• The set of unsatisfactory indicator values (red),
• The set of marginal indicator values (yellow), and
• The set of satisfactory indicator values (green).
Thus instead of just using a single light that is either red, yellow or green to indicate
whether the indicator status is unsatisfactory, marginal or satisfactory, we need to

- 14 -
show partial memberships in the three sets. A fuzzy traffic light is basically one in
which more than one light bulb can be lit at one time. Fuzzy membership is
commonly represented by the symbol µ and so in the fuzzy set approach we need to
determine the three membership functions µr, µy and µg, and then find a graphic way
to represent these.
A normal traffic light is a special case of a fuzzy light; for example, a green
light is represented by the set of memberships µr=0, µy=0 and µg=1 – it is sometimes
more convenient to write this as a vector (µr, µy, µg), especially when programming
fuzzy models. In general the sum of the memberships is one, µr + µy + µg =1.
If we want to represent a status Indicator that is close to the dividing line between
red and yellow (that is to say, marginally bad), in the standard Traffic Light Method
we have to decide whether the light is 100% red or 100% yellow. With a fuzzy light it
can be 50% red and 50% yellow. Figure 6 shows a more general case in which the
light is 20% red, 70% yellow, and 10% green, using a histogram to show the different
partial memberships.

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

Figure 6. Representation of a fuzzy traffic light with a histogram

Although a histogram like that shown in Figure 6 is a good way of representing

partial set memberships in a mathematically concise way, it lacks the clarity and
transparency of more realistic “traffic lights”, and therefore several alternate
representations have been considered.
The representation which most clearly resembles a traffic light is a bubble
chart, such as the one shown here. The sizes of the three “bubbles” represent the
amount of imaginary current flowing through the corresponding light, which is
proportional to the membership in the corresponding fuzzy set. The figure to the
right shows a large red light showing that the indicator is strongly negative, but
there is some yellow and even green showing as well. Of course it is not always
meaningful to illuminate all three lights at once, and usually just a mixture of red
and yellow or green and yellow is what we expect. The possibility of all three
lights at once is shown for completeness.
The main problem with the bubble chart representation is that the interpretation
of the sizes of the lights is not clear. The fuzzy memberships are represented by the
sizes of the bubbles, but is the size the diameter or the area? Even if we specify which
we mean, the human eye does not always follow instructions, and the perception may
not correspond to the actual values.

- 15 -
 A more quantitatively reliable representation is to use pie charts, such as the one
shown here. This pie chart shows the same information as the fuzzy traffic light
shown above, but it is quantitatively more informative, and whether the eye sees the
areas of the slices or the arcs which they subtend, the result is the same.
The pie chart has another advantage over the traffic light representation, in that
we can easily use pie charts of different sizes. This lets us add another dimension to
the representation of indicator variables, namely their weight or importance or
reliability. Not all indicators figure equally in evaluating the state of a fishery, and it is
desirable to have some way of distinguishing between important and reliable
indicators like stock size and those that represent minor or controversial factors. If
new variables are taken into consideration it is best if they can be introduced
gradually, by assigning a low weight to them, than if they must immediately be
weighted as heavily as well-established ones.
While the sum of memberships for each indicator variables is one, if we vary the
areas of the pie charts to represent weighting, we can obtain a convenient visual
representation of the integrated value. Without taking weighting into account, the two
pie charts in Figure 7 appear to cancel each other out, one showing mostly red and the
other an equal dominance of green. However, it is clear that the total red area is
considerably greater than the amount of green, reflecting the greater importance (i.e.,
weight) of the first indicator, so the combined value would be predominantly red.

Figure 7. Two pie charts showing different relative weights

While pie charts have major advantages over traffic lights, they both suffer from
the problem that it is difficult to represent a sequence of indicators with them. Many
variables, such as stock size, are available as time series and it is desirable to be able
to represent these in a coloured fashion as a continuous function of time. The solution
is to use a quasi-one-dimensional representation, namely stacked bar charts, which
contain the same information as pie charts but offer an extra degree of flexibility. The
two stacked charts shown in Figure 8 represent the same information as the pie charts
in Figure 7, with the width of each bar representing its weight, and the information in
the charts is the same. As will be shown in the next section, it is easy to represent time
series in this way. An added benefit is that the structure of the bar charts is similar to
that of the traffic lights, so that this representation combines the traffic light graphic
with the quantitative content of the pie charts.

- 16 -
 Figure 8. Two stacked bar charts showing different relative weights

How Many Colours?

In principle a fuzzy traffic light can show one, two or three lamps at the same time,
and there is no reason other than avoidance of confusion to restrict the number to
three. As a practical matter one can ask how many of these lamps should be
illuminated at the same time.
A traffic light with both red and green showing can be confusing, and it has been
suggested that no more than two of the lamps, red and yellow or yellow and green,
should be illuminated at once. However, this restriction converts the Fuzzy Traffic
Light Method into what is basically an averaging technique, with no way of
representing uncertainty.
This raises a serious question in the context of using the precautionary approach,
since it is not clearly desirable that negative indicators that are in the minority should
be cancelled out by favourable indicators – if 40% of the experts or other indicator
measures are negative, should this be ignored by a process of merging indicators to
make the result even simpler than what three lights convey?
The three basic alternatives are: two lights at a time (red and yellow or yellow and
green), three lights (red, yellow and green), or a continuous spectrum as suggested at
the January workshop. To summarise the preceding discussion about these:
• Two fuzzy lights are better than three standard lights and can convey more
information, but the use of both red and green at the same time seems to
cause confusion. For this reason the yellow light should be included, even if
only two lights at a time are to be shown.
• Three lights meet the basic requirements of a GRSI, and in particular can be
used to represent uncertainty.
• A continuum based on averaging does not offer any significant advantages.
Averaging is just another term for defuzzification (as defined later on in the
report), and should be the final stage in the analysis project. By using a light
which just represents an average, the diversity of indicators and the element
of uncertainty and risk is lost.
It seems best to use the three-colour scheme. However, in assigning values to
Indicators there are advantages of simplicity and clarity to using just two lights at a

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time. For this reason we shall use the notations 2/3 and 3/3 to refer to schemes which
use three lights, but either use only two at a time or permit the use of all three.

Common Currency
The first step in implementation of the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method is to transform
each indicator variable into a “common currency”, that is to say a uniform
representation that can be compared with other indicators.
With the standard Traffic Light Method the common currency is a single traffic
light, which can be red, yellow or green, and the transformation method is to
determine cut points separating red from yellow and yellow from green ranges. For
example, the following two tables show how we might map stock size and
temperature into standard traffic lights:
Stock Size Light Temperature Light

Under 40 kt Below 5 C

40 to 50 kt 5 to 10 C

Over 50 kt 10 to 15 C

15 to 20 C

Above 20 C

Figure 9. Linear and non-linear traffic light indicators

Note that in the case of temperature the mapping is non-linear, but easily understood.
Fuzzy traffic lights are more general and the conversion from indicator to light is
quite different, although the standard light representation still exists as a special case.
Instead of defining cut points we need to represent a gradual transition between poor
and good conditions, and this can best be accomplished with an index that represents
how favourable the conditions are on a scale of 0 to 1, or 0 to 100%. This index
corresponds to the partial membership in fuzzy set theory, but it is simpler to refer to
it just as the Score.
Since the Score is a continuous variable, instead of a table mapping ranges to
traffic lights we use graphs showing the value of the score as a function of the
indicator value. For example, for stock size and temperature the curves might look
like the graphs in Figure 10:
100% 100%
80% 80%
60% 60%
40% 40%
20% 20%
0% 0%
30 35 40 45 50 55 60 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Stock Size (kt) Temperature (C)

Figure 10. Typical (quasi-)linear and non-linear indicator scores

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To convert these score functions into fuzzy traffic lights we need to specify a way of
translating between the numerical value of the score and the corresponding set of
lights. The transformation of a set of fuzzy memberships into a numerical value is
called “defuzzification” and normally is not reversible (i.e., one cannot start from the
defuzzified score and figure out what the memberships are), but if we adopt the
restriction that only a maximum of two lights at a time will be used to represent each
indicator, and that we will not use both red and green lights simultaneously, it
becomes possible to assign a unique set of fuzzy memberships to each value of the
Score; this is the scheme referred to earlier as 2/3.
We do this by defining the relationship between fuzzy memberships and score by
the equation
Score = 0.0 * µr + 0.5 * µy + 1.0 * µg
where µx represents the fuzzy memberships. Since µr + µy + µg = 1, and either µr or µg
must be zero, these three conditions suffice to calculate the fuzzy memberships µx.
The result is that if Score < 0.5 we get µr = 1 - 2 * Score, µy = 2 * Score and µg = 0,
while if Score > 0.5 we get µr = 0, µy = 2 – 2 * Score and µg = 2 * Score - 1. It can
easily be verified that in the limit Score → 0.5 both solutions give us just a yellow
light (µy = 1). These formulae are easy to implement in any programming language or
in a spreadsheet, and we see how the lights vary with Score in Figure 11:

100
80
60
40
20
0%
Score
Figure 11. Conversion of scores to lights

By drawing a vertical line through the chart the memberships of red, yellow and green
can easily be identified.

Showing Several Indicators at Once

The Fuzzy Traffic Light Method with pie charts is useful for characterising the
current status of fish stocks and displaying information about the various indicators
that are used in management. It is more difficult to use this method to show how the
conditions of the stocks are changing over time, which is also a problem with the
standard Traffic Light Method. However, by using an alternate but equivalent stacked
bar representation it is possible to plot fuzzy traffic lights over time.
The information in a pie chart can be represented just as well by stacked
columns, sometimes called area charts, as shown in Figure 12:

- 19 -
 100%

75%

50%

25%

0%

Figure 12. Comparison of pie chart and stacked bar

The greatest strength of the bar chart formalism is that it can easily be adapted to
the representation of sets of variables, such as time series or observations in different
locations. Suppose for simplicity that we have a time series of just five data points,
and for each of these data points the traffic light representation is as shown in Figure
13:

Figure 13. Representation of a time series by stacked bars

We can connect the bars to obtain an interpolated time series representation that looks
like Figure 14:

- 20 -
 Figure 14. Representation of a time series by an area chart

Thus the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method with stacked bars can easily be transformed into
an area chart for representing time series of continuous phenomena, and the
interpolated representation of Figure 14 can easily be generalised into a chart like the
one shown in Figure 15

100%

75%

50%

25%

0%

Figure 15. Area chart representation of a time series – the area chart can be
thought of as a sequence of stacked bars

which shows a hypothetical time series indicating gradual improvement in state of the
stock as the level of green increases and both the yellow and red decrease. This is a
simple extension of the stacked bar method, with no separation between the lights.
The significant point to recognise here is that this figure displays an integrated
representation of the stock status over time, as opposed to a time series plot of a single
variable. If the same approach were applied to the standard Traffic Light Method the
result would simply be a bar of changing colour, like Figure 16:

Figure 16. Area chart corresponding to standard traffic lights

- 21 -
Although this coloured bar shows periods when the stock was in bad and then good
shape, with transitional yellow zones in between, it does not provide either the same
amount of information or the clarity that the fuzzy chart does.
There are of course many other ways of representing fuzzy traffic lights, but the
stacked bar chart approach with the possibility of connecting the bars to obtain a time
series picture is probably the best of those that have been discussed so far. This will
be discussed in greater detail in the next section.

More about Yellow Lights

While even a Fuzzy Traffic Light Method based on just two lights, red and
green, can provide a better assessment tool than the standard Traffic Light Method
with three lights, there are reasons for retaining a yellow light in the fuzzy
methodology as well. Consider a situation where there are equal numbers of indicators
with very poor and very good values, and another situation where all of the indicators
are in the middle of the range. In the standard terminology the former case
corresponds to equal numbers of red and green lights, and the latter to all yellows.
Either way we would expect the result to be a yellow light (assuming that the different
indicators can compensate for each other, that is to say that none of the red indicators
are “pre-emptive”), but it would be advantageous to find some way of showing
whether the indicators were all consistent with each other or not.
A system of three fuzzy lights offers this sort of flexibility. Figure 17 shows
several hypothetical fuzzy traffic lights representing the combined effect of several
indicators containing an equal amount of red and green:

Figure 17. Several fuzzy traffic lights displaying equal amounts of red and green,
but with different degrees of uncertainty

The first could be the integrated value of many yellow indicators, or it could be the
result of combining some very high and some very low indicator values by an
averaging technique. The second “light” is more complicated, but more informative –
it shows that of the several indicators that make it up, over half were in the yellow
region. The next two show that there are few or no marginal indicators, and that the
equal quantities of red and green seem to contradict each other, which suggests a high
degree of uncertainty in the result. This type of representation, although more
confusing, can also be more informative, since it helps to know whether all of the
indicators are borderline, or whether some are very favourable while others are very

- 22 -
negative. This latter situation, where there is inconsistency between the different
indicators and a resulting ambiguity arising from contradictory evidence, suggests a
higher level of risk to the assessment than is the case when all indicators support the
conclusion that the stock condition is marginal.
These considerations suggest a generalisation of the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method
which would use just the “2/3” red-yellow and yellow-green lights to classify
individual indicators, but which would use all three colours to describe the combined
significance of several indicators. This could even be extended to cases where
standard traffic lights are used for Indicators , so that if, for example, we had four
Indicators, 2 red and one each yellow and green, the Characteristic would be
represented by a pie chart or stacked bar that was 50% red and 25% each yellow and
green.

Pre-emptive Indicators
It is possible to expand the representation of fuzzy traffic lights to identify pre-
emptive red lights. The pie chart in Figure 18 shows a situation which is equivalent to
equal numbers of red (unsuitable) and green (suitable) indicators, with most indicators
on the borderline, but where one or more of the red indicators is pre-emptive, namely
it overrides and effectively vetoes all the of the other indicators.

Figure 18. Pie chart showing a pre-emptive red indicator

The same is possible with the stacked bar type of representation, as in Figure 19,
although outlining the pre-emptive variable in this way is not quite as dramatic and
using a dark fill can help:

- 23 -
 Figure 19. Stacked bar chart showing pre-emptive red indicator

The alternative, of course, is simply to use solid red whenever a pre-emptive indicator
is red. This is probably the best solution.

Linear and Non-linear Indicators

One of the great advantages of the Traffic Light Method, aside from its intuitive
clarity, is its ability to represent non-linear indicators, such as temperature (c.f. Figure
9 and Figure 10). Temperatures close to an optimum value can be represented by a
green light, the two ranges further out can be yellow, and the extremes red. The
advantages of the Traffic Light Method are even greater when one deals with
variables that are not well understood and are harder to calibrate in the laboratory,
such as upwelling indices.
Many Indicators behave like that shown in Figure 20, as the Indicator increases
the score increases monotonically and the colour of a standard traffic light changes
from red through yellow to green.

100%

75%
Score

50%

25%

0%
Indicator Value

Figure 20. Standard traffic light colours and quasi-linear score

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To implement this with the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method it is necessary map the Score
associated with the Indicator into a combination of traffic lights. This can be done
with the equations giving above, which are described in greater detail in Appendix I.
The procedure for non-linear Indicators is basically the same. A plot of Score
vs. temperature looks like a bell-shaped curve that peaks at the optimal temperature
and falls off in either direction. However, it is not necessary to be overly
mathematical about the functional form of the Score, and standard laboratory data on
the temperature dependence of growth and other condition factors can be used to
obtain a reasonable mathematical expression. The relationship between temperature,
the fuzzy Score (which can be used to determine the fuzzy traffic lights), and the
corresponding standard traffic lights, is shown in Figure 21:

100%

75%
Score

50%

25%

0%
Temperature
Figure 21. A typical non-linear indicator, Score vs. Temperature

While the actual assignment of Scores to different indicator values really

requires consultation with experts and cannot be fully resolved here, it is important to
recognise that some of assignments that have been suggested based on values relative
to means and variances cannot be used in general cases. While a stock size that is
twice the historical mean may be very good, a temperature that is twice the historical
mean would probably be disastrous, especially if temperatures are measured on the
Kelvin scale!
There are several alternative approaches to classification of indicators that
should be considered, even though they lack the appearance of statistical rigor that a
strictly mathematical procedure offers. The best way is probably to rely on the
opinions of experts, either through informal discussions or with a more structured
Delphi procedure. The assignments in the impact study described in Angel et al.
(1998) were made in a very informal way, but there was good agreement among the
experts and the results were consistent with a different analysis based on a much more
quantitative approach using geochemical data. Neural networks can also be used to
obtain reproducible results in situations where there are many replicate situations to
be analysed (neural networks require very large amounts of data, which limits but
does not eliminate their applicability to fisheries problems).
Particular consideration should be given to establishing indicators based on the
judgement of non-scientific experts, such as fishermen, who may have very valuable
information to provide but who may not be able to put it into quantitative form. The

- 25 -
Traffic Light Method is ideally suited for soliciting input from such individuals, and
should be viewed not only as a way of presenting the results of a research study, but
also as a way of identifying and classifying important indicators. The old sailors’
adage,
Red sky at night, sailors’ delight,
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning
is a classic example of the kind of useful information that seafaring men can provide
if not constrained to put it in the language of numbers. It is easy to express this
couplet in terms of traffic lights of course, but it would be difficult to quantify it
exactly – when precisely do morning and night begin and end, and how do we
measure the redness of the sky, are questions best avoided.

Combination of Indicators
A crucial requirement of any assessment method is that it be able to integrate
different types of information, which may at times contradict each other. This is
certainly the case in stock assessment where, for example, one may have to balance
the negative effects of low spawning stock against promising evidence for favourable
recruitment conditions. When indicators are represented by raw data this can be
extremely difficult – trying to combine biomass data with an upwelling index is very
much a case of adding apples and oranges.
When the data are converted into a uniform representation, of which the Traffic
Light Method is a good example, then it is possible to deal with different indicators on
an equal footing. However, how to combine them is still a challenging problem which
can be difficult to resolve on both scientific and political grounds.
Some indicators are pre-emptive, meaning that certain red lights can override
any number of green lights. The U. S. Endangered Species Act is an example of this –
if any species is endangered by proposed development, the development cannot be
approved. In Canada there are laws governing conservation and habitat loss which
are, at least in principle, pre-emptive. In general, pre-emptive indicators are a matter
of policy and are not of a purely scientific nature. Most indicators can be balanced
against each other, so that an unfavourable indicator might be compensated by one
that is more promising.
The mathematical tools to deal with different ways of combining indicators
exist, and although selecting and implementing the correct way to deal with a variety
of different indicators may be difficult, in general it can be solved. Pre-emptive
indicators can be combined with the fuzzy intersection operator, which sets the Score
to the minimum of the values for the individual indices. This way, if the Score
associated with any of the pre-emptive Indicators is zero, meaning that some critical
level has been crossed, then the intersection and thus the resulting Score is also zero.
In situations where positive and negative indicators can compensate each other,
an operator like symmetric summation (Silvert 1979) can be used to balance one
against the other. This was the approach used in the paper by Angel et al. (1998) to
evaluate the impacts of fish farms. In the present instance however a somewhat
different approach seems called for, since a wider range of input types is involved,
and the work of Angel et al. was not based on the precautionary approach.

- 26 -
 The integration procedure followed in the this report, and illustrated by the
programs described in Appendix IV, is based on Weighted Average Memberships
(WAM). The mathematical procedure is described in Appendix I, but the WAM
method can easily be visualised by looking at the coloured areas in a representation of
several traffic lights – if we add up the total areas that are red, yellow and green in the
separate lights, that gives us the relative areas of the combined total. This is illustrated
in Figure 22, which shows two Indicators of unequal weight, the first having twice the
weight of the second.

Figure 22. Two Indicators of different weight

The first Indicator is half red and half yellow, corresponding to a Score of 25%, while
the second is half yellow and half green, which gives it a score of 75%. The weighted
mean score is thus (2 × 0.25 + 1 × 0.75)/(2 + 1) = 42%. Applying the WAM method
to obtain the traffic light representation of the integrated value, we see that the relative
areas of the coloured lamps are red:yellow:green = 2:3:1, so the summary light is 33%
red, 50% yellow, and 17% green (this can be verified with the demonstration program
Combine.exe described in Appendix IV).

Defuzzification
We can convert the fuzzy representation back into standard traffic lights by
setting up a simple set of rules for interpreting the red-yellow-green mixture in terms
of single lights. This is easiest to understand with the 2/3 + 3/3 representation, where
we use only two colours at a time for the fuzzy traffic lights, but use all three colours
for the “defuzzified” standard representation. For example, we could decide that the
light is green if the Score>¾, red if the Score<¼, and yellow if the Score lies between
¼ and ¾. Since the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method retains all of the information in the
original indicator we can always go from the fuzzy approach to the standard one (this
is called “defuzzification”), but we cannot go the other way. We know that a fuzzy
value of Score=0.38 corresponds to a yellow light, but if we have a yellow light in the
standard method there is no way of determining whether it represents 0.74 or 0.26 or
any value in between.
For three fuzzy traffic lights we need only a slightly more sophisticated
formulation to summarise the meaning of three lights into one. One way is to calculate
a defuzzified Score in a similar way from the formula µ = 0.0*µr + 0.5*µy + 1.0*µg =
µg + µy/2 and apply the same mapping. For example, if all three lights are on equally,

- 27 -
µr = µy = µg = 0.33, then Score=0.5 and we have a yellow light. This is less
informative than the fuzzy version, since having all three lights on indicates much
greater uncertainty than just having the yellow lit, but it shows that defuzzification is
possible so that the results can be presented without necessitating reference to fuzzy
set theory.
This method of defuzzification generates the same Score as the weighted mean
described earlier. If we apply it to the example in the previous section, where the
WAM method gave memberships of is 33% red, 50% yellow and 17% green, the
defuzzified value is 0.17 + 0.50 / 2 = 42%, the same result as obtained by averaging
the weighted Scores.

Quantification of Uncertainty
While the use of fuzzy logic makes it possible to represent uncertainty, there is no
standard way for characterising uncertainty in the same way that we can use a score in
the defuzzification process. For this project an ad hoc method is therefore proposed,
which represents uncertainty on a scale of 0 to 100% like the Score.
While it might seem that a fuzzy traffic light with two lights shows more
uncertainty than a single black, two lights do not show uncertainty (except when they
are red and green). The reason is that the two adjacent colours simply show the status
of an Indicator between red and yellow or between yellow and green – an equal
mixture of red and yellow shows that the score is halfway between red and yellow, so
if red is ½ and yellow is ½, the 50-50 mixture shows a score of ¼.
We can only infer uncertainty when there is a mixture of both red and green, since
the two contradictory indicators clearly show that there is conflict or inconsistency in
the constituent Indicators. Consequently a reasonable measure of uncertainty is
4×µr×µg, which has a maximum value of one when µr = µg = ½ and µy = 0, and
becomes zero if either µr or µg is zero.
Since the measure we use for uncertainty is somewhat arbitrary, in order to avoid
confusion with standard statistical measures of variance the term “Discord” will be
used to indicate the degree to which both red and green are present in the
representation of an Indicator or Characteristic.
Conclusion
While the Traffic Light Method has many advantages in terms of simplicity and
clarity, the discrete nature of the three classifications are very restrictive and make it
necessary to discard potentially useful information in order to use the method. A
fuzzy generalisation of the approach makes it possible to retain its advantages while
retaining valuable information.
A fuzzy traffic light is one in which more than one light can be illuminated at a
time, with varying intensity, and it is easiest to represent it by a pie chart or stacked
bar where the different “lamps” correspond to slices of the pie or segments of the bar.
This is the usage followed in most of this draft, although other representations are
possible and can be preferable for different situations. For example, a stacked area
chart provides a useful way of representing changes in stock status over time.
The approach described here is very similar to that of fuzzy control theory, and
many of the results and methods of fuzzy control theory can be used in this problem.

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This gives the methodology a degree of standardisation that may make it more
palatable to managers. However, the mathematical formalism is not trivial, and the
integrating procedure has to be flexible enough to reflect biological reality. Clearly
some indicators, such as stock size, are more reliable than others, and should be
weighted more heavily in determining the summary values – in fact, it may be
desirable to treat stock size as a critical indicator which overrides all others (i.e., pre-
emptive). There are ways to address this, but it must be pointed out that not all
software packages for implementing fuzzy sets have this capability.
References (Annotated)
The following papers provide useful background material for implementation of the
Fuzzy Traffic Light Method. Not all of these papers are cited in the text.
Angel, Dror, Peter Krost and William Silvert. 1998. Describing benthic impacts of
fish farming with fuzzy sets: theoretical background and analytical methods. J.
Appl. Ichthyol. 14: 1-8. This paper describes an application analogous to a Fuzzy
Traffic Light Method to assess changes in the benthic conditions under fish farms
over time.
Ashby, W. Ross. 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman and Hall, London.
295 p. The classic resource on cybernetics, and on the Requisite Variety Principle
in particular.

Brodie, P. 1984. A surface area or thermal index for marine mammal energetic
studies. Acta Zool. Fennica 172: 153-155. This paper suggests the use of total
surface area of the population as an Indicator.
Enea, M.ario, and Giuseppe Salemi. 2001. Fuzzy approach to the environmental
impact evaluation. . Ecological Modelling 135/2-3: 131-147. A general and
mathematical approach to environmental impact evaluation.
Kosko, B. 1986. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. Int. J. Man-Machine Studies 24: 65-67. This
is the paper where Kosko first introduced the idea of fuzzy cognitive maps, and
there are many subsequent papers on the subject by him and others.
Silvert, William. 1979. Symmetric summation: a class of operations on fuzzy sets.
IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cyber. SMC-9:657-659. Reprinted in Readings in Fuzzy
Sets for Intelligent Systems, D. Dubois, H. Prade, and R. R. Yager (eds.), Morgan
Kaufman (San Mateo, CA) 1993, p. 77-79. Describes a method of combining
fuzzy memberships in a way suitable for integrating ecological indicators.
Silvert, William. 1997. Ecological impact classification with fuzzy sets. Ecological
Modelling 96: 1-10. Although it deals with impact classification, this is the baisis
for later work on the use of fuzzy logic in environmental science.
Silvert, William. 2000. Fuzzy Indices of Environmental Conditions. Ecological
Modelling 130/1-3: 111-119. This covers general aspects of the use of fuzzy logic
for environmental issues and would be a good complement to this report.
Silvert, William. 2001. Fuzzy aspects of system science. In: Integrative Systems
Approaches to Natural and Social Sciences - Systems Science 2000, M. Matthies,
H. Malchow and J. Kriz (eds.), Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Zimmermann, H.-J. 1991. Fuzzy Set Theory and its Applications. Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Boston/Dordrecht/London. The major reference on fuzzy set theory.

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Appendix I – Algorithms and Mathematical Formulae
This Appendix summarises mathematical formulae that can be used to implement
the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method. These methods may be further refined, but this
should be a good starting point.

Specifications
The Fuzzy Traffic Light Method uses a set of three lights to represent the state of
any Indicator or Characteristic, and the area of each light is proportional to the
corresponding membership in each of three fuzzy sets, as follows:
• red represents the set of adverse conditions
• yellow represents the set of marginal conditions
• green represents the set of favourable conditions
In addition, each traffic light is assigned a weight.
The precise form of the representation is not fixed, but it should have enough
flexibility to provide a good idea of the areas involved. The two forms used so far are
pie charts and stacked bar graphs. The area of the figure should be proportional to the
weight. This works well with bar graphs, where the weight can be represented by the
width of the bar, but with pie charts there can be confusion between areas and
diameters. For this reason, bar charts may be preferable, although they are not as
familiar. Illustrations of these methods and of bubble charts are in the Appendix I.

Terminology
The memberships in the fuzzy sets red, yellow and green are represented by the
symbols R=µr, Y=µy and G=µg (in the normal language of fuzzy set theory these
would be referred to by the longer and more redundant term “partial membership
function”). The weight of each Indicator or Characteristic is indicated by W.
Memberships are normalised, so R + Y + G = µr + µy + µg = 1.

Defuzzification
The defuzzification process involves converting the partial memberships into a
single numerical score S. There are many ways to do this, but the simplest is to define
S = 0.0 * R + 0.5 * Y + 1.0 * G = Y/2 + G
which takes values between 0 and 100%.

Constrained Fuzzification
In general it is not possible to recover the original fuzzy memberships when only
the defuzzified score is known. For example, the fuzzy memberships (R, Y, G) = (0,
1, 0), (0.5, 0.0, 0.5) and (0.3, 0.4, 0.3) all have the score 50%, so if we know that the
defuzzified score is 50% all we know is that there are equal memberships in red and
green, but these could take any value between 0 and 50% with the rest being yellow.
However, if we constrain the fuzzy sets by requiring that only one or two colours
can appear, and that we do not want both red and green at the same time, then with

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this additional condition it is possible to obtain a unique set of fuzzy memberships
(this is what is referred to as the 2/3 representation). For example, if the score is 50%,
and we know that this means equal memberships in red and green (R=G), the added
condition that we cannot have both red and green means that R=G=0 and Y=1.
The general algorithm for constructing constrained fuzzy set memberships is as
follows:
• If S<0.5: R=1-2*S, Y=2*S, G=0 (R, Y, G) = (1-2*S, 2*S, 0)
• If S>0.5: R=0, Y=2-2*S, G=2*S-1 (R, Y, G) = (0, 2-2*S, 2*S-1)
It is easy to verify that if S=0.5, both formulae give (R, Y, G) = (0, 1, 0).

Integration
There are many ways to integrate several fuzzy sets. Only two will be discussed
here, since they seem most appropriate for use in fisheries management.
The main point to consider is whether the constraint that both red and green lights
should not appear at the same time should apply to Characteristics as well as
Indicators. This is not a recommended approach, since it suppresses the display of
uncertainty, which is one of the major advantages of the fuzzy approach, but it is
included here for completeness. If both red and green cannot be shown
simultaneously, the greatest advantage of the fuzzy approach – representation of
uncertainty – is lost, although the fuzzy representation can still be used. The
integration procedure is simply to find the weighted average of the scores and fuzzify
it according to the above formulae. The weighted mean score is:
Sav = Σi Wi * Si / Σi Wi
The other integration method, which is genuinely fuzzy and can be used whether
the sets being combined are also in fact fuzzy or are the result of a fuzzification
procedure, is to average the areas assigned to each set in a similar way. The result is
the set of three equations
Rav = Σi Wi * Ri / Σi Wi
Yav = Σi Wi * Yi / Σi Wi
Gav = Σi Wi * Gi / Σi Wi
and it can easily be verified that both the normalisation condition Rav + Yav + Gav = 1
and the obvious requirement that the mean score Sav = Σi Wi * Si / Σi Wi is given by
Sav = Yav / 2 + Gav
are satisfied.

Summary
Of the various representations considered for showing fuzzy traffic lights, the three
most likely possibilities, in order of decreasing preference, are
1. Stacked Bar Charts
2. Pie Charts
3. Bubble Graphs

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These are shown in Appendix II. In all three the relative memberships are represented
by the relative areas of the coloured portions, but with circular figures there is a
psychological problem in that the eye sometimes confuses areas with diameters in
judging the relative size of circles. For that reason the bar chart, where the heights of
the constituent bars correspond to the memberships and the width to the weight, is the
most accurate representation. The pie chart shows the relative memberships well, but
comparison of the areas of different pies to show different weights is less reliable. The
bubble graph, despite its close resemblance to a real traffic light, does not represent
the relative memberships well, and does not offer a good way to show weights.
Constrained fuzzification can be used to translate numerical scores into 2/3 fuzzy
representations, and might be best for representing Indicators. However, although it
could also be used for representing Characteristics, there are good reasons not to do
this, as the ability of the Fuzzy Traffic Light Method to show uncertainty and conflicts
in the evidence is lost in this way. Averaging the areas seems a far better procedure.
Appendix II – Representations
Figure 23 shows the three representations considered in this report, the stacked bar
chart, pie chart, and bubble chart.

100%

75%

50%

25%

0%

Figure 23. Three possible representations of fuzzy traffic lights

These are just three of many ways to display “traffic lights” that have some
resemblance to real traffic lights but have enough flexibility to be used to represent
fuzzy lights, with more than one on at a time.
A simple representation which works for standard traffic lights but not for fuzzy
ones is to use just one light and change the colour, either to red, yellow or green, or to
a wider spectrum of colours as was suggested at the January workshop. By using just
a single colour one loses the power of the fuzzy approach, which is to indicate the
degree of discrepancy between indicators. The 2/3 approach suffers the same fault,
and while it is probably easier to interpret a configuration that is part red and part
yellow than one with just a single light that is a shade of orange, the amount of
information in the two is the same (assuming that the shades of orange are continuous
and distinguishable).
Of the three representations shown in Figure 23, the bubble diagram most
resembles a traffic light, which has considerable merit. However, it suffers from two
serious disadvantages. One is that it is a bit ambiguous, since it is not clear whether
the area or the diameter of the lights is the quantity that represents the magnitude of
the memberships. The second is that it is difficult to show the relative weighting of
different indicators with a bubble diagram. For this reason one should be reluctant to

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use the bubble diagram representation unless it achieves a high level of user
acceptance.
The other two forms avoid the first of these problems, since the size of the slices of
pie or the height of the bar sections clearly represent the memberships. Both the
diameter of the pie and the width of the bar can be used to indicate different weights,
although with the circular pie chart it again is difficult to tell whether the area or the
diameter of the pie is representative of the weight. This gives the exploded bar chart
an advantage, as well as the fact that it more resembles a traffic light.
Appendix III – Code Samples
The following code fragments show how to implement these algorithms in
languages like C. A slightly more general terminology has been used, for example the
keyword “global” is introduced since in C the scope of a variable is defined by its
position and this creates confusion when looking at code fragments. I have also
replaced the specialised keywords “float” and “double” with “real”.
The first code fragment shows how to convert a numerical Score between 0 and 1
to a traffic light representation:

/* Red, Yellow, Green and Score are reals */

global real Red, Yellow, Green;

/* convert Score to one or two traffic lights */

real indicate(real Score) {
/* check that Score is in valid range */
if (Score < 0 || Score > 1) return(-1);
if (Score < 0.5) {
Yellow = 2*Score;
Red = 1 – Yellow;
Green = 0;
} else {
Yellow = 2 - 2*Score;
Green = 1 – Yellow;
Red = 0;
}
return(Score);
}
The next code fragment shows how to integrate a set of N weighted Indicators or
Characteristics. The individual memberships are stored in the arrays R[idx], Y[idx]
and G[idx], and the weights are W[idx], where idx is an index that runs from 1 to N,
and the integrated values are stored in R[0], Y[0] and G[0] (W[0] is used for the sum
of weights, and should be 1 if the weights are normalised). The arrays are statically
dimensioned to the largest value of N, Nmax, that is used.

global real R[Nmax], Y[Nmax], G[Nmax], W[Nmax];

/* combine and integrate indicator values */

void integrate (int N) {
/* initialise variables */
R[0] = 0;

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 Y[0] = 0;
G[0] = 0;
W[0] = 0;
int idx = 0;
/* run a loop from 1 to N */
while (idx++ < N) {
/* increment the storage counters */
R[0] += W[idx] * R[idx];
Y[0] += W[idx] * Y[idx];
G[0] += W[idx] * G[idx];
W[0] += W[idx];
}
/* divide the weighted sums by total weight */
R[0] /= W[0];
Y[0] /= W[0];
G[0] /= W[0];
return;
}
The final code fragments do defuzzification:

/* convert traffic lights to numeric score */

real defuzzify(real Red, Yellow, Green) {
return(0.5 * Yellow + Green);
}

/* calculate uncertainty in traffic lights */

real discord(real Red, Yellow, Green) {
return(4.0 * Red * Green);
}

Appendix IV – Programs
Two Visual Basic programs are included with the report, both with full source code
and material for installation. The full source code is in the project files, but for
convenience the code for the interactive subroutines are included in Appendix V. The
first of these, GRSI.exe, demonstrates the two recommended implementations of the
Fuzzy Traffic Light Method, pie charts and stacked bars. This can be used to
familiarise users with these types of representation and to aid in selecting which is the
better choice. The program contains two slider bars to adjust both the value of an
Indicator and its weight. It is also possible to convert the fuzzy lights to standard ones.
The second program, Combine.exe, shows how two Indicators can be combined
using the algorithm described in Appendix I. The program uses two sets of sliders to
adjust the values and weights of the two Indicators, and a third chart shows the
resulting integrated value. Note that while the Indicators are always represented with
no more than two colours, the combined value can show all three.
An Excel 97 spreadsheet called Combine.xls is also included. This shows how a
larger number of Indicators (11 in all) can be combined.
Both Combine.exe and Combine.xls display both the mean Score and Discord of a
combination of Indicators. This can be used to examine both the way that fuzzy traffic

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lights are integrated and defuzzified, and the way that uncertainty, represented by the
Discord value, reflects differences in the constituent Indicators.
A short PowerPoint segment, FTLM.pps, provides an introduction to the concept
of fuzzy traffic lights and can be used as a briefing tool.
Finally, an animated GIF called slider.gif shows how a two-colour traffic light can
be used to represent an Indicator. To view this, open the web page Slide.html in a
browser window.
Appendix V – Visual Basic Source Code
This appendix contains the code for the Visual Basic 6 subroutines in GRSI and
Combine. The full code, including initialisation settings, is in the project files
GRSI.frm and Combine.frm.
Here is the code for GRSI, which illustrates the implementation of fuzzy traffic
lights with pie charts and stacked bars:

Private Sub Form_Load()

ValueSlider.Value = 0
WeightSlider.Value = 5

Chart.ChartType = VtChChartType2dBar
Chart.Width = 2400
Chart.Row = 1
Chart.Data = 0
Chart.Row = 2
Chart.Data = 0
Chart.Row = 3
Chart.Data = 100
Fuzzy.Value = 1
Bar.Value = True
Pie.Value = False
End Sub

Private Sub Fuzzy_Click()

Call ValueSlider_Change
End Sub

Private Sub Pie_Click()

Bar.Value = False
Chart.ChartType = VtChChartType2dPie
End Sub

Private Sub ValueSlider_Change()

Red = 0
Yellow = 0
Green = 0

v = 0.1 * ValueSlider.Value

If Fuzzy.Value = 1 Then

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 If v < 0.5 Then
Yellow = 200 * v
Red = 100 - Yellow
Else
Yellow = 200 - 200 * v
Green = 100 - Yellow
End If
Else 'crisp traffic lights
If v < 0.35 Then
Red = 1
ElseIf v < 0.65 Then
Yellow = 1
Else
Green = 1
End If
End If

Chart.Row = 1
Chart.Data = Green
Chart.Row = 2
Chart.Data = Yellow
Chart.Row = 3
Chart.Data = Red
End Sub

Private Sub WeightSlider_Change()

Chart.Width = 300 * (3 + WeightSlider.Value)
End Sub

Here is the code for Combine, which shows how two fuzzy indicators are
integrated by taking the weighted combination of their values. This code also
calculates the Score and Discord values.

Private Sub Form_Load()

For i = 0 To 1
ValueSlider(i).Value = 0
WeightSlider(i).Value = 5

Chart(i).Width = 2000
Chart(i).Row = 1
Chart(i).Data = 0
Chart(i).Row = 2
Chart(i).Data = 0
Chart(i).Row = 3
Chart(i).Data = 100
Next i
Total.Width = 3000
Total.Row = 1
Total.Data = 0
Total.Row = 2

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 Total.Data = 0
Total.Row = 3
Total.Data = 100
End Sub

Public Sub ValueSlider_Change(i As Integer)

Dim v(0 To 1) As Single
Weight = 0
For j = 0 To 1
v(j) = 0.1 * ValueSlider(j).Value
Weight = Weight + WeightSlider(j).Value
Next j
If v(i) < 0.5 Then
Yellow = 200 * v(i)
Red = 100 - Yellow
Green = 0
Else
Yellow = 200 - 200 * v(i)
Green = 100 - Yellow
Red = 0
End If
Chart(i).Row = 1
Chart(i).Data = Green
Chart(i).Row = 2
Chart(i).Data = Yellow
Chart(i).Row = 3
Chart(i).Data = Red
Call combine
End Sub

Private Sub combine()

Dim v(0 To 1) As Single
Dim w(0 To 1) As Single
Dim r(0 To 1) As Single
Dim y(0 To 1) As Single
Dim g(0 To 1) As Single

score = 0
Weight = 0 ' total of all weights
For j = 0 To 1
v(j) = 0.1 * ValueSlider(j).Value
w(j) = WeightSlider(j).Value
Weight = Weight + w(j)
If v(j) < 0.5 Then
y(j) = 200 * v(j)
r(j) = 100 - y(j)
g(j) = 0
Else
y(j) = 200 - 200 * v(j)
g(j) = 100 - y(j)
r(j) = 0

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 End If
score = score + v(j) * w(j)
Next j

Red = 0
Yellow = 0
Green = 0

For j = 0 To 1
Red = Red + w(j) * r(j)
Yellow = Yellow + w(j) * y(j)
Green = Green + w(j) * g(j)
Next j
If Weight < 0.001 Then Weight = 0.001
Total.Row = 1
Total.Data = Green / Weight
Total.Row = 2
Total.Data = Yellow / Weight
Total.Row = 3
Total.Data = Red / Weight
score = score / Weight
discord = 0.0004 * Green * Red / (Weight * Weight)
txtScore.Caption = "Score = " & Format(score, "0%") &
",
Discord = " & Format(discord, "0%")
End Sub

Public Sub WeightSlider_Change(i As Integer)

Chart(i).Width = 200 * (3 + WeightSlider(i).Value)
Call combine
End Sub

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