Multi-criteria decision making under uncertainty for flood mitigation

Designs of flood mitigation infrastructural systems are decision-making which are often made under various uncertainties involving multiple criteria. Under the condition of uncertainties, any chosen design alternative has the likelihood to perform inferior to other unselected designs in terms of the adopted performance indicators. This paper introduces a quantitative risk measure based on the concept of expected opportunity loss (EOL) for evaluating the consequence of making the wrong decision. The EOL can be used to assess the relative performance of multiple decision alternatives and is extended to deal with decision problems involving multiple criteria. In particular, the probabilistic features of the consequences associated with a design alternative is considered and used in the Preference Ranking Organization Method of Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE) MCDM technique. The integration of PROMETHEE and decision making under uncertainty is demonstrated through an example of flood damage mitigation planning.