Ranking water transfer projects using fuzzy methods

Water scarcity is an important problem in water resources. There is not enough financial capability to execute all water resources projects at one time; therefore it is important to rank execution projects. One of the vital issues in water resource management is project ranking. The objective of this paper is to employ different fuzzy multiple attribute group decision-making methods for ranking some of the inter-basin water transfer projects of the Karun river. The methods were: maximising and minimising sets method; the Bonissone's method for group decision making; fuzzy Topsis for group decision making; and fuzzy decision-making software. A set of ten inter-basin water transfer projects with eight criteria were considered. The weights of criteria were determined by five water resources experts, then based on the selected criteria, the rating preference for each alternative was obtained by the experts. Finally, the results of different methods were compared. The final ranking results were comparable with each other. The Spearman rank correlation coefficient was employed to assess the correlation coefficient between the ranking results obtained by the above multiple attribute decision-making methods. Also, sensitivity analysis on different selected criteria weights was conducted.