Improved analytic hierarchy process for evaluating water resources sustaining utilization

As a core problem of regional sustainable development strategy research, evaluation of regional water resources sustaining utilization system is a complex system which consists of indexes of population, resources, environment, economy and society, whose key problem is how to quantify with reasonly the weights of each index of the system. To resolve the problem, the application of an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is studied in this paper. In order to correct the consistency of judgement matrix in the AHP, a new method, named AGA-CAHP, is proposed to check the consistency of judgement matrix and, at the same time, compute rank weights by using the accelerating genetic algorithm developed by the authors. The results of theoretical analysis and case study show that the AGA-CAHP has visual, practical, stability and high precision, and that the AGA-CAHP can be applied to other practical evaluation systems.