Decision support system for water transfer evaluation

A decision support system (DSS) is developed to help decision makers analyze the economic, social, and ecological ramifications of water transfers. Such a DSS is needed because the U.S. is evolving from a development water economy to a more complex one that emphasizes conservation and reallocation (i.e., transfers). The DSS is composed of three main modules: (1) a conjunctive surface‐ground water model, (2) the impact analysis segment which uses a geographical information system that integrates model output with information from the study area to estimate economic, social, and ecological impacts, and (3) a multicriteria decision making algorithm that ranks the transfer schemes based on trade‐offs of indicators which are assembled into a hierarchical structure. A case study in which 10 different water transfer alternatives are examined is provided to demonstrate an application of the proposed DSS.