Abstract
This paper proposes an approach for defining the criteria set required for multicriteria decision making. An approach is developed for a specific class of water management problems, and a SWOT/PESTLE analysis is recommended for identifying the internal and external factors that influence a given water system. The factors are grouped into six categories: political, economic/financial, social, technical, legal, and environmental (PESTLE), and separated afterwards according to their positive or negative influence on the system. All factors are filtered by a proposed elimination algorithm to identify the non-inferior factors and declare them as candidates for inclusion into the criteria set. An approach is applied to the real-life problem of how to define the criteria set and enable the selection of the optimal reconstruction solution of a water intake structure within a regional hydro-system in Vojvodina Province, Serbia. To verify the developed approach, an independent expert is invited to asses all factors identified by the SWOT/PESTLE analysis using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and to rank factors by order of preference. The outcome is satisfactory because the seven top-ranked factors from AHP completely matched the list of factors derived from the elimination algorithm.
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This work was supported in part by Serbian Ministry of Education and Science and Provincial Secretariat for Science and Technological Development of Vojvodina Province.
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Srdjevic, Z., Bajcetic, R. & Srdjevic, B. Identifying the Criteria Set for Multicriteria Decision Making Based on SWOT/PESTLE Analysis: A Case Study of Reconstructing A Water Intake Structure. Water Resour Manage 26, 3379–3393 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-012-0077-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-012-0077-2