Evaluation of the fuzzy and classical methods of hierarchical analysis in prioritizing the sub-basins of the 22nd district of Tehran from watershed management perspectives

Nowadays, urbanization and increasing construction and industrialization of cities in developing and developed countries have led to reduced permeable surfaces, climate change, and excessive use of and demand for surface and subsurface water resources. Therefore, most cities have faced phenomena such as severe floods, scarcity of surface and subsurface waters, land subsidence, dust and so on. In addition, the inefficiency of traditional flood management strategies has resulted in massive floods in cities, causing extensive financial and life losses, inundation, and heavy traffic in these areas. Aquifer and watershed management are among the environmentally friendly ways that manage floods, in addition to controlling them, and solve the problems to a great extent by the integrated management of surface and groundwater resources. In this study, an integrated flood management approach is applied on the basis of the aquifer management criteria using GIS software. Then, the weights of the criteria are calculated using the fuzzy method (fuzzy AHP) of Chang, Buckley, and Mikhailov, and the above steps are performed for the classical method of hierarchical analysis as well. Based on the prioritized 15 sub-basins of the 22nd district of Tehran as well as the mean squared error (MSE), it turns out that all the 4 methods show the priorities 1 to 4 alike, and the differences among them are in the other 11 sub-basins. The results of the MSE method also show that the criteria weights in Mikhailov's fuzzy method are closer to those of the classical method, and among the fuzzy methods the weights calculated from the Buckley and Mikhailov’s methods are closer to each other.