Evaluating the Resilience of Water Resources Management Projects in River Basins Considering Stakeholder's Characteristics

In recent years, methods for evaluating the resilience of water resources management projects, especially during extreme conditions, have attracted much attention from researchers. Resilience is the ability of a system to withstand crises or successive difficulties so that it can recover or reach an acceptable level of performance. In previous works, the assessment of resilience of water supply and demand scenarios throughout a river basin has not been adequately researched. In addition, to decide on determining appropriate management scenarios, it is necessary to consider the powers, organizational positions and limitations of different stakeholders. In this paper, first, the resilience of a water supply-demand system under events with known and unknown probabilities is evaluated. In the next step, scenarios of water supply and demand resilience in Zarrinehrud river basin, which is the most important sub-basin of the Lake Urmia basin, are analyzed using a multi-agent-multi-criteria decision-making method. Then, the results are compared with those of a decision-making method without considering the role of stakeholders. Finally, to consider stakeholders utilities and powers, a combination of a leader-follower game and evidential reasoning (ER) approach is used to determine appropriate scenarios. The results showed that in the decision-making method with one level (without leader-follower game), the implementation cost of the selected scenario is 21% higher than that of the scenario selected using the multi-agent-multi-criteria decision-making method. Also, the difference between supply-demand resilience of the selected scenarios using the two methods is low and the resilience of the selected scenarios in both methods are appropriate. Finally, the payoff of the selected scenario in the multi-agent-multi-criteria decision-making method is estimated to be 0.72. Therefore, in using the leader-follower game, a more logical scenario is selected, so that the selected scenario has a reasonable resilience and cost.