title: A new approach to aid urban water management decision making using trade-off sacrifice modelled by fuzzy logic.
abstract: An approach to aid decision making for urban water management is presented that is based on the concept of trade-off sacrifice level in pairwise comparisons between criteria, modelled using fuzzy logic. This approach is illustrated by a case study - selection of alternative water supplies for a Sydney household. Four key decision making criteria covering health, economic, environment and technical aspects are selected: annual probability of infection, life cycle energy use, life cycle cost and reliability. The decision making problem is to select between cases with different volume and application of recycled greywater and rainwater in light of the four criteria. Decision maker's preference is expressed by five levels of trade-off sacrifice between pairs of criteria. The decision makers can assign their preferences for sacrifice level by linguistic assessment and the output trade-off weight (TOW). Measures of decision makers' perceived trade-off level are modelled by a rule-based fuzzy logic control system. The final analysis shows the performance for each sacrifice class for each case, to aid overall decision making with stakeholders.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Water and Waste Technology, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. elai@civeng.unsw.edu.au
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lai
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lundie
authors.forename: N J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Ashbolt
mesh_terms: D002947:Cities; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011891:Rain; D014881:Water Supply