An efficient decision-making model for evaluating irrigation systems under uncertainty: Toward integrated approaches to sustainability

Abstract

Agriculture is essential for many countries that depend on crops for food production and security. So, evaluating irrigation systems and selecting the best one is critical and gives various benefits such as water use efficiency, productivity, and agricultural development. This paper proposed a framework for conserving water and increasing effectiveness by using a suitable irrigation system. We used the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology to deal with conflict criteria in the evaluation process. We used two MCDM methods such as Criteria Importance Through Inter-Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method to compute the weights of the irrigation system criteria, and the spherical fuzzy double normalization-based multiple aggregations (DNMA) method to rank the irrigation systems (alternatives). The main advantage of CRITIC method computes the conflict and variability of the criteria by calculate weights of them. The main advantage of DNMA is used the two normalization method to rank the alternatives. These methods are integrated with spherical fuzzy set (SFS) fuzzy information in the assessment process. It has three values: membership, non-membership, and hesitant degrees to overcome uncertainty in the assessment steps. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study to show its performance. This study used 20 criteria of irrigation systems and 10 irrigation systems (alternatives) to select the best alternative. The results are discussed from the perspective of five experts. The sensitivity analysis is conducted to show the stability of the results. The comparative analysis is performed to show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The results show the proposed methodology is more robust compared to other methods. • Irrigation systems are evaluated under uncertainty model. • CRITIC and DNMA methods are used to evaluate the irrigation systems. • The spherical fuzzy set used to deal with uncertainty information in the evaluation process. • Intensive verifications with other challenging approaches are discussed. • A case study is proposed to illustrate the rationality of the proposed model.