Analysis of Flood Risk Management Strategies Based on a Group Decision Making Process via Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Numbers

The sustainability concept has influenced decision-making patterns in various managerial fields. Watershed-based flood risk management (FRM), as an extremely complex multidisciplinary issue, has to deal with various conflicting, sustainable development criteria. The following measures through a novel structure were considered to address the complexity and uncertainty of watershed-based FRM: (1) the FRM strategies were formulated via matching internal strategic factors against external ones through Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat (SWOT-TOWS) matrix; (2) a Multi Attribute Group Decision Making (MAGDM) process was applied to prioritize the strategies with consideration of sustainable development attributes; (3) the Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy Numbers (IVIFNs) were merged into TOWS matrix as a novel procedure to overcome the uncertainty of the judgments. According to pairwise comparisons of the seven proposed attributes, the urgency of need was obtained as the first-ranked attribute. The overall prioritization of 10 TOWS-based strategies with IVIFNs revealed that the highest priority among the strategies belonged to implementation of social learning process to raise the residents’ awareness concerning water and soil conservation plus sustainable agriculture with the aid of NGOs. Throughout the present study, SWOT-TOWS matrix not only could properly identify the fundamental strategic factors but also developed the mitigation strategies including structurally and non-structurally-based measures. In addition to the IVIFNs, pairwise comparisons performed appropriately to evaluate the attributes’ weights. Finally, the proposed IVIFN-based MAGDM technique allows the analysts to aggregate several individual exact numerical scores of an attribute into an IVIFN through a simple, practical and straightforward group decision making mechanism.