Evaluating water reuse applications under uncertainty: generalized intuitionistic fuzzy-based approach

Abstract

Water reuse is a viable option to increase urban water supply, especially under new realities of climate change and increasing anthropogenic activities. A sustainable water reuse application should be cost-effective and have acceptable health risk to consumers. Water reuse application evaluation is complex because data acquisitions are usually associated with the problems of uncertainty, hesitancy, and parameterization. In this paper, a generalized intuitionistic fuzzy soft set (GIFSS)-based decision support framework is proposed to provide an effective approach to describe uncertainty and hesitancy in an intuitionistic fuzzy number. In addition, the modified measures of comparison and similarity are proposed to compare water reuse applications. Then, the proposed framework is applied to the City of Penticton (British Columbia, Canada) to evaluate seven water reuse applications. The evaluation results show that the applications of garden flower watering and public parks watering are the most preferred alternatives, which are consistent with the existing practice in the city. Furthermore, the results are highly affected by the generalized parameter and the weights of evaluation criteria. Both the comparison measure-based and similarity measure-based evaluations within the same GIFSS-based framework produce consistent results, indicating an applicable and efficient methodology.