Water security evaluation based on the TODIM method with probabilistic linguistic term sets

Nowadays, water security is becoming increasingly prominent and the water security problem becomes a primary bottleneck restricting China’s future sustainable development. Water security in China is thus worth conducting an in-depth study. This paper aims to explore an effective water security evaluation method. Based on the proposed definition of water security, an evaluation index system of water security is first built from the perspective of “pressure–state–response” conceptual model. Considering the indicators’ uncertainty and the decision makers’ (DMs’) limited knowledge, the DMs usually use linguistic terms to express their judgements. As a new type of linguistic variable, probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) not only allows the DMs to express their judgements with multiple linguistic terms but also can reflect the DMs’ different preference degrees over these possible linguistic terms. For the water security issue under probabilistic linguistic environment, a programming model is developed to derive the attribute weights. Then, the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for interactive multi-criteria decision making) method, which considers the psychological factors of the DMs, is used to evaluate water security based on the PLTS. Furthermore, a case study is conducted and some discussions and comparative analysis are carried out according to the case results.