A Three-Way Decision Approach for Water Resources System Resilience Evaluation and Its Application

Resilience is a significant uncertainty thought of water resources system security. Compared with risk analysis, resilience pays more attention to the ability of water resources system itself to deal with adverse events. However, a standard system of water resources system resilience’s concept and evaluation have not yet formed. In view of this, this study had attempted to decompose the process of resisting interference of water resources system and analyzed the characteristics and influencing factors of three sub processes of resistance, recovery and adaptation. Furtherly, a new resilience evaluation index system of water resources system was explored and a three-way dicision approach for water resources system resilience analysis based on variable fuzzy sets and partial connection number was developed. Specifically, a multi-grade quantitative evaluation of water resources resilience was carried out based on variable fuzzy sets method, and then the quantitative evaluation results were transformed into qualitative decision-making results using a new three-way decision model based on partial connection number of set pair analysis. Finally, a case study of China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt (YEB) in 2008–2017 was performed and the results show that the resilience of water resources system in the YEB does not show an obvious improvement trend, or even almost stagnant. Of the 110 samples, 83.6% were at the medium level. Only 6.4% are barely at the excellent level, but they are basically in Shanghai.