Extended OWA operator for group decision making on water resources projects

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. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9496(2008)134:3(266) CE Database subject headings: Water resources; Multiple purpose projects; Decision making; Iran; Conflict.