Fuzzy models for accumulation of reported community noise annoyance from combined sources.

Many scientists have investigated noise annoyance caused by combined sources. However, general annoyance reported in a social survey still has many unknown features. In this work the cognitive process involved in coming to a general noise rating based on a known, in context, rating of annoyance by particular sources is studied. A comparison of classical and fuzzy models is used for this. The new fuzzy linguistic models give a meaning to the successful strongest component or dominant source model that was used in previous work. They also explain to some extent particular features not included in that previous model. The variance not predicted by the fuzzy linguistic model is contrasted with personal data of the test subjects (age, gender, and education level) and the context of the question in the questionnaire. Only age seems to play a significant role.