Five Most Popular MCDM Techniques in Water Resource Management
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Decision support systems are used to assist a decision-maker in selecting the best available solution from a set of solutions. The problem with the existing method of selection lies in the fact that the choice may change with the change in the decision maker as the entire process is subjective and does not follow any specific operating procedures to execute the selection. Any DSS that is used to manage water or energy-based systems will require to consider multiple factors before selecting a single option from the set of numerous other options to solve a single problem. For example, if we want to select the best location for the installation of a Hydro-power plant(HPP) and we have three different locations available for carrying out the desired operation then we have to look for specific factors based on which we can identify the best location. Now these factors are required to be evaluated for each location to come to a conclusion. Again not all the factors are equally important. If the location selection of HPP is the objective and if flow, head, and cost of land are the factors then each location will be assessed based on the given factors. Here you can see that not all the factors are equally important. The flow will be most significant and the head will be least significant if all the three factors are compared. But for another decision maker, the selection may be different.
That is why factors are required to be compared with respect to the criteria : (For present example: Uncertainty caused and political decision making or Political, Environmental, Social and Technological interventions(PEST) on the factors) is required for evaluation of the factors. Once the factors are compared with each other with respect to each criterion considering the significance of each factor for that criterion with respect to the goal of the problem, the significance of factors becomes numerical and unchanged for all the investigators. Although in recent years many new decision-making techniques have been innovated which are multifaceted, efficient, and technologically advanced, but still if you do not know the use of the following five decision-making techniques you can not decide numerically as these are the methods that are used most commonly to find the best option among many.