## 14 Focus on Water Supply
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Citation** & **Method** & **No. Criteria** & **Notes** \\ \hline
[145] & PROMETHEE, TOPSIS & 7 & Istanbul (Turkey) water supply expansion \\ \hline
[146] & ELECTRE III & 8 & Uses group decision making, applied in Iran. \\ \hline
[147] & AHP & 3 & Rainwater harvesting rural options (Bengal, India) \\ \hline
[148] & Visualisation & 7 & Urban rainwater harvesting and flood reduction \\ \hline
[149] & SAW & 3 & Retrofitting water recovery plants \\ \hline
[151] & AHP, TOPSIS with k-means clustering & 4 & Optimal design of district metering regions \\ \hline
[152] & AHP & 14 & River water transfer selection in Iran \\ \hline
[153] & MOORA, TOPSIS, VIKOR & 5 & Water distribution network design. \\ \hline
[154] & PROMETHEE, SAW & 4 & Water distribution system upgrade. \\ \hline
[155] & SAW & 9 & Finding suitable areas for aquifer recharge. \\  & & & This study explicitly took account of interactions between criteria. \\ \hline
[156] & TOPSIS/AHP & 9 & Groundwater pumping and storage solutions \\ \hline
[157] & AHP & 30 & WETSUIT tool for design of water treatment works. Applied in India, the paper has a detailed presentation and analysis of its results. (for project information see \\  & & & [[https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/169860](https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/169860)]([https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/169860](https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/169860)) -water-treatment-solutions-for-india (accessed on 24 March 2021)) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 13: Examples of the application of MCDA in water supply decisions. also been used in conjunction with other methods. In one case, three methods were combined, AHP, TOPSIS and COPRAS. 4. In the applications papers reviewed above, the largest number of criteria used in an example was 32 and the minimum was 3 with a mode of 7, so, in most cases, MCDA is being applied to decisions with considerable complexity. 5. Only a small number of papers mention the drawbacks of many of the methods, particularly the possibility of rank reversal [158] and its dependence on the number and type of alternatives considered in the analysis. This is disappointing because there are precautions that can be taken to mitigate this potential problem [159] and most of the articles analyzed here do not appear to address this issue. 6. While a reasonable number of papers integrated MCDA with GIS when the decisions had a spatial character, very few integrated with Building Information Systems (BIM). In the Civil Engineering context, more would be expected since BIM can be considered a major tool in the design and construction of structures [160]. 7. Relevant papers known to this author did not trigger the bibliographic search criteria so were not selected. This emphasizes the important of using a mixture of specific and broad keywords to ensure papers are found and included in reviews. 8. Papers are being published relating MCDA applied to Engineering education. 9. The main application areas have a high degree of complexity either in design or resource allocation configurations that benefit from an automated decision support capability. 10. Surprisingly, the name of any specific software package did not appear in the keywords of papers in the database. This may be because of a lack of awareness by Civil Engineers of the software support available, irrespective of which MCDA method they prefer. The following section lists some of the main packages available.