Evaluating groundwater ponds for urban drinking water supply under uncertainty

Abstract

Emerging deficits of drinking water in urban distributive systems require the application of sophisticated methodologies for assessing sources of water and deriving required strategic decisions about future development and exploitation of these sources. If there are more urban groundwater ponds of fresh water, their prioritization may help in planning allocation of human, technical, organizational, and other resources. Multi-criteria analysis and optimization, as a part of the decision-making process, can help in achieving the tasks. The possible approach is to use the fuzzy version of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and tackle this uncertain and imprecise process. Fuzzified AHP can be combined with fine-tuning mechanisms which emulate the optimism-pessimism behavior of decision-maker(s) and simulate their attitudes towards risk. The fuzzy decision-making (FDM) approach is presented for the evaluation of three groundwater ponds for freshwater supply in the city of Novi Sad, Serbia. The complete problem hierarchy is treated and a parallel control mechanism, the standard (crisp) version of AHP, is employed to assure a more convenient and reliable environment during the judgments performed by the decision-maker. Results encourage further research in the subject area.The applicability of the approach is considered relevant to other uncertainty-related problems.