Extended OWA Operator for Group Decision Making on Water Resources Projects
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Volume 134, Issue 3
Abstract
Six water authorities share the Sefidrud watershed in the northwestern region of Iran and resolving the conflict among them is one of the major challenges of the water division of the government. In this paper a group decision support system will be developed for identifying the criteria and their weights, needed for ranking water resource projects in this watershed. This model will be based on extending the ordered weighted averaging (OWA) as an aggregation operator. The order weights of this operator will be determined first by using the minimal variability method. Second, a new measure will be developed to quantify consensus among the stakeholders. It guides the supervisor of the group decision making problem to negotiate with stakeholders effectively in the conflict resolution process. Using extended OWA, 13 water resources projects in the Sefidrud watershed will be ranked. A simulation study will also be reported, where the dependence of the optimal decision on the uncertainty level is examined. In addition, a new sensitivity analysis model will be introduced for the combined goodness measures of the projects with respect to the optimistic degree of the supervisor. A new composite measure of goodness will also be defined to obtain reliable solutions.
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Acknowledgments
The writers are grateful to the Water Resources Management Company of Iran and the Mahab Ghodss Consulting Engineers for their valuable data. The scholarship from the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology of Iran for the first writer to work in the University of Arizona and the hospitality of the Systems and Industrial Engineering Department of this university are also appreciated. The writers would like to express their sincere gratitude to the respectful referees whose insightful suggestions enhanced the quality of the paper.
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Published In
Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Volume 134 • Issue 3 • May 2008
Pages: 266 - 275
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Oct 25, 2006
Accepted: Oct 18, 2007
Published online: May 1, 2008
Published in print: May 2008
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