Developing a framework for water right allocation in inter-basin water transfer systems under uncertainty: The Solakan–Rafsanjan water transfer experience

In this article, a methodology is presented for water allocation to demands in new inter-basin water transfer projects. In this methodology, by proposing some criteria such as universality, equity, enforceability, adaptivity, and exclusivity, a new scheme is developed in order to determine the share of water users. For taking the available water uncertainty into account, the concept of conditional value at risk (CVaR) is used, in which the goal is to minimize an indicator of loss in low flow conditions. Also, in order to estimate the relative weights of criteria, a novel method is introduced. This method is founded on two essential information aggregation operators, namely, hybrid weighted averaging (HWA) and ordered weighted averaging (OWA). The significant property of this method is that the weighting process is done by considering the relative weights of experts and the viewpoint of the analyzer jointly. The results of the CVaR-based model are compared with those obtained from a long-term water allocation optimization model with monthly time steps. The performance of the proposed methodology is evaluated using available data from the Solakan–Rafsanjan water transfer project.