A Novel Hybrid Approach for Water Resources Carrying Capacity Assessment by Integrating Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation and Analytical Hierarchy Process Methods with the Cloud Model

The water resources carrying capacity (WRCC) shows remarkable fuzziness and randomness, which causes the uncertainty and instability of the WRCC assessment (WRCCA). In order to solve these problems, we proposed a novel hybrid approach for WRCCA, in which the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods were integrated with the cloud model (CM). Firstly, an evaluation indicator system of WRCC was constructed. Secondly, the AHP and FCE methods were subsequently improved with the CM. The CM was used to scale the relative importance and aggregate the judgment matrices, where the weights of the clouds were obtained. These integrations of AHP and CM greatly reduced the randomness in the weight calculation; the CM was used to describe the comment sets, calculate the membership degree matrices and determine the assignment clouds, the evaluation sets and the WRCCA index clouds were obtained. These integrations of FCE and CM effectively blurred the boundary fuzziness and gave more intuitive results. Finally, the hybrid FCE-AHP-CM approach was applied to a case study. It was concluded that the novel approach has particular advantages in dealing with the fuzziness and randomness comprehensively, and therefore could assess the WRCC and enhance the robustness and intuition of WRCCA results.