A novel MICMAC approach for cross impact analysis with application to urban water/wastewater management

Abstract

Water as the core of Sustainable Development (SD) alongside a significant increase in the global demand for water causes the subject of Urban Water and Wastewater (U2W) management to be essential in exploring the future. As a means of future studies, MICMAC reveals the influence and dependence of a variable concerning all others by examining all interactions in the system. These interactions should be analyzed in two dimensions: “Impact” and “Time”. Usually, two types of impacts are used, including direct and indirect. Also, most methods have a critical weakness in that it does not include the impact of “time” in the analysis.This paper suggests a novel approach to MICMAC (named MICMAC-T), which promotes understanding indirect cross impacts by considering the influence of “time” in analysis. This helps in particular with U2W, which faces major future challenges toward SD. The practical approach developed in this paper can be quickly and flexibly initiated because of its toolbox-based design, integrating text mining, PESTEL, MICMAC, Floyd-Warshall, and interviews in a single model. Therefore, the proposed method could also be considered a new contribution to the CIA.To demonstrate the contribution of MICMAC-T, the case of the Iranian U2W pathway toward SD is investigated to find the driving forces. The results of applying this approach in finding the driving forces for Iranian U2W include new interesting findings. The results of MICMAC-T suggest that “Legal comprehensiveness,” “Urban economic development policies,” “High-level policy documents,” “Public social awareness in society,” “Geographical location (climate),” “Law enforcement guarantee,” “U2W governance”, and “Urban water resources scarcity” are driving forces for the Iranian U2W. Among these variables, “Urban economic development policies” and “Public social awareness in society” were neglected in traditional MICMAC and categorized as driving forces only using MICMAC-T, which indicates the crucial influence of time on Iranian U2W.