Group-decision Model for Improvement of Water Infrastructure

Problems with water infrastructure are characterized by strong pressures of various stakeholders, besides to have heavy environmental and financial restrictions. This paper presents a group decisionmaking model for improvement of water infrastructure specially regarding with the reduction of water losses, by the integration of soft and hard approaches of Operational Research. Firstly, the soft approach was incorporated to facilitate in sharing information and to formalize the integration among the members of the group based on SSM – Soft System Methodology. Secondly, the hard approach was used with the problem already structured, through the multicriteria evaluation, applying the outranking method PROMETHEE II with all members of the group to obtain the individual priorities. Finally, a new decision problem was considered, where the criteria are the decision-makers and the individual net flows are the assessment suggested for the alternatives.