Risk identification on hydropower project using the IAHP and extension of TOPSIS methods under interval-valued fuzzy environment

Risk identification on hydropower project, the first step of risk management process, is an extremely complex issue and has a significant impact on the efficiency of the following risk assessment and control. On the other hand, finding out some more possible risk factors among many risk ones is a multi-criteria decision making problem. This paper develops an evaluation model based on the interval analytic hierarchy process (IAHP) and extension of technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), to identify exactly the more possible risk factors under a complex and fuzzy environment. In this paper, the IAHP is used to analyze the structure of risk identification problems in hydropower project and to determine weights of the criteria and decision makers, and extension of TOPSIS method with interval data is used to obtain final ranking of potential risk factors in hydropower project. Risk identification on an earth dam is conducted to illustrate the utilization of the model proposed in this paper. The application could be interpreted as demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013