Aggregation of Inputs from Stakeholders for Flood Management Decision-Making in the Red River Basin

Abstract

The Red River Basin in Canada faces periodic flooding where flood management decision-making problems often involve multiple objectives and multiple stakeholders. To enable more effective and acceptable decision outcomes, more participation in the decision-making process is required. A challenge is to obtain and use the diversified opinions of a large number of stakeholders where uncertainty plays a major role. In response to this challenge, a methodology has been proposed to capture and aggregate the views of multiple stakeholders using fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic. Three possible response types: scale (crisp), linguistic (fuzzy) and conditional (fuzzy) are analyzed to obtain the aggregated input using Fuzzy Expected Value. The methodology has been tested for flood management in the Red River Basin using a generic case study. While the results show successful application of the methodology, they also show significant differences in preferences of the stakeholders as a function of location in the basin. Thus the paper provides alternative ways for collecting and aggregating the input of multiple stakeholders to assist the flood management decision-making process. © 2004, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.