Water resources management involves complicated social, organizational, legal and economical issues in addition to the undoubtedly important technical matters and environmental aspects. Management decisions have potential to be controversial because the involved groups (ecologists, economists, hydrologists and sociologists) hold distinct interests and unique objectives. Therefore, the development of decision support systems (DSS) faces great difficulties not only because of the multiple objective and multiple participant decision making situation but also due to the complexity of participating an team interdisciplinary in the modelling processes. For instance, while ecologists use natural languages and qualitative reasoning for the description of ecological relationships, hydrologists communicate in the form of systems of differential equations or analytical models. The proposed concept suggests to identify specific performance indicators to quantify the multiple objectives and assess the management scenarios under investigation. The indicators are classified into ecological, economical, social and technical indicators. To overcome the problem of multiple participant, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is implemented to assign weights to the involved decision makers with respect to their experience and background. The management scenarios will be assessed and ranked according to the predefined performance indicators with respect to the opinion of decision makers taking into consideration their assigned weights. Fuzzy logic (FL) is used to facilitate transformation of qualitative knowledge into mathematical assessment models. FL is also implemented to model and aggregate the performance indicators. Finally, the paper introduces a case study for implementing this concept for the management of irrigation schemes.
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