Evaluation approach of water source based on Analytic Hierarchy Process

From the geographic view, rivers or lakes in America often run through several states or even across the half country which makes it difficult to categorize by their natural locations, let alone to allocate them. In an economist's perception, economy in states can have huge discrepancy which directly leads to a rugged graph in water-demanding chart or water use table. Our main goal is to figure out the ideal weight ratio of various uses of water by addressing the storage and movement, de-salinization and conservation in water process, covering the economic, physical and environmental benefits. We first divide the whole American region into 3 parts according to the location of its main river basins. Then the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Model is adopted to filter all the influential factors and extract the final 10 criteria which determine the water uses in those 3 sections. With their weights come out, the abstract problem is successfully transferred into a mathematical one. We conclude with a series of recommendations to the Water Management Department in the U.S., for how best to allocate water resources due to the current natural distribution of river basins. The outcome of our paper we get about the ratio of water supply quantity in domestic water, process water and water for ecological environment is 5:80:15.