A combined interval TOPSIS with multiple sensitivity strategies decision-making framework

Reasonable water resources management is critical for promoting the sustainable development of social economy. In the real world, water managers often work in an uncertain environment, and this uncertainty comes from inaccurate information related to water resource data. Therefore, there is uncertainty about the value of criteria in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) and evaluation of water resources management. In addition, the robustness of multi-criteria decision-making evaluation based on uncertain data is difficult to quantify, which poses challenges to the application of MCDM in water resources management. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-making framework combining interval TOPSIS and a multi-sensitivity strategy. The framework is used for robust water resources management under uncertain conditions, revealing the optimal solution under the influence of uncertainty and sensitivity strategies, and identifying the ranking change mechanism by revealing the threshold of each criterion to identify alternatives as the optimal solution. The applicability of the proposed framework is verified in different cases (including water resources allocation and reservoir flood control operations). The outcomes indicate that: (1) the proposed framework expands the capabilities of current methods and provides a potential approach to deal with the robustness of options identified by decision makers engaged in water resources management under uncertainty; (2) among the proposed sensitivity strategies, the strategy of changing one or more criteria of a single scheme is more realistic in a changing environment; (3) in the case analysis, two cases show that changing from the lower position to the first position requires 80% and 45% of a set of criteria values. The findings of this study will provide a scientific basis for water resources managers to make robust scheme decisions.