A Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making Methodology Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets: Application to Water Resources Mana
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A Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making Methodology Using Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets: Application to Water Resources Management Ehsan Pourmand 1 & Najmeh Mahjouri 1 & Maryam Hosseini 1 & Farzaneh Nik-Hemmat 2 Received: 13 August 2019 / Accepted: 31 August 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
In this paper, a new fuzzy group decision-making methodology which determines and incorporates negotiation powers of decision makers is developed. The proposed method is based on a combination of interval type-2 fuzzy sets and a multicriteria decision making (MCDM) model, namely TOPSIS. To examine the applicability of the proposed methodology, it is used for finding the best scenario of allocating water and reclaimed wastewater to domestic, agricultural, and industrial water sectors and restoring groundwater quantity and quality in the Varamin region located in Tehran metropolitan area in Iran. The results show that the selected scenario leads to an acceptable groundwater conservation level during a long-term planning horizon. Although the capital cost of this scenario is high, which leads to groundwater restoration during the 34-year planning horizon, it is determined as the best allocation scenario. This scenario also entails the second least pumping cost, due to less water allocation from the groundwater. To evaluate the results of the proposed methodology, they are compared with those obtained using some well-known interval type-2 decision-making approaches including arithmetic-based, TOPSIS-based, and likelihood-based comparison methods. The Spearman correlation coefficient shows that the obtained results generally concur with those of the other methods. It is also concluded that the proposed methodology gives more reasonable results by calculating and considering the negotiation powers of decision makers in an extended TOPSIS-based group decision-making model. Keywords Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) . TOPSIS . Interval Type-2 fuzzy set (IT2FS) . Negotiation power . Water resources management
* Najmeh Mahjouri [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Pourmand E. et al.
1 Introduction Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), as a part of Operations Research (OR), can select the best alternative from a set of alternatives through evaluating several related criteria or attributes. In real-world situations, a group of decision makers (DMs) have conflicting interests and preferences when selecting a management policy or scenario among different alternatives (Pourmand and Mahjouri 2018, Darbandsari et al. 2020). MCDM techniques are considered as capable tools to help engineers and scientists solve decision-making problems. However, realworld situations usually contain several uncertainties, which are generally caused by a lack of accurate or precise information or unclear judgments of DMs (Mardani et al. 2015, Motlaghzadeh et al. 2020). Using fuzzy logic, proposed by Zadeh (1965), one can address some of these uncertainties by applying fuzzy numbers and linguistic
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