Designing the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to Determine Water Allocation Priority for Mahabad Dam

In recent years technical tools have shown great progress for modeling many problems of water resources. Multiple criteria decision-making process is a helpful tool to resolve water management issues. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is a developed form of conventional analytic hierarchy process that confirms all the comparisons in the form of fuzzy logic. In this study a hierarchical structure was designed to determine water allocation priorities of Mahabad Dam's for water users of the dam water with different purposes. In this structure three criteria and six subcriteria were considered for six alternatives of water use of the dam. Results showed that the economic criterion with local weight of 0.45 was the most important one. In addition the allocation of water to the agricultural sector with a global weight of 0.356 was the first priority and other priorities were urban drinking, recreation - environmental, power generation and flood control respectively.