Identifying the Criteria Set for Multicriteria Decision Making Based on SWOT/PESTLE Analysis: A Case Study of Reconstructing A Water Intake Structure

This paper proposes an approach for defining the criteria set required for multicriteria decision making. An approach is developed for a specific class of water management problems, and a SWOT/PESTLE analysis is recommended for identifying the internal and external factors that influence a given water system. The factors are grouped into six categories: political, economic/financial, social, technical, legal, and environmental (PESTLE), and separated afterwards according to their positive or negative influence on the system. All factors are filtered by a proposed elimination algorithm to identify the non‐inferior factors and declare them as candidates for inclusion into the criteria set. An approach is applied to the real‐life problem of how to define the criteria set and enable the selection of the optimal reconstruction solution of a water intake structure within a regional hydro‐system in Vojvodina Province, Serbia. To verify the developed approach, an independent expert is invited to asses all factors identified by the SWOT/PESTLE analysis using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and to rank factors by order of preference. The outcome is satisfactory because the seven top‐ranked factors from AHP completely matched the list of factors derived from the elimination algorithm.