AGRICULTURAL WATER MANAGEMENT AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, cilt.271, ss.1-12, 2022 (SCI-Expanded)
Soke Plain (Turkey) is one of the two plains where cotton production is the highest in Turkey, the leading country
for cotton production in the Mediterranean Basin. The cropping pattern in Soke ¨ Plain is dominated by cotton
with a ratio of 97%. The overall irrigation scheme is equipped with conventional systems (i.e., surface, furrow)
whose efficiency is approximately 50% due to high evaporation and physical losses. Water efficiency improvement in cotton irrigation necessitates a thorough evaluation of the agricultural water management for Soke ¨ Plain,
a water-scarce region under drought threat. In this paper, a hybrid multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)
method is presented for the evaluation and selection of irrigation methods. This process involves various
potentially conflicting qualitative and quantitative criteria, therefore, a hybrid MCDM method such as HF-AHPPROMETHEE II is needed to make decisions. In HF-AHP-PROMETHEE II, “Hesitant Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy
Process” (HF-AHP) is first implemented to determine importance weights of criteria and then “Hesitant Fuzzy
Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enriching Evaluations II” (HF-PROMETHEE II) is utilized to assess
and rank the irrigation method alternatives. For comparison analysis, HF-AHP-TOPSIS (HF-AHP-Technique for
Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method is also implemented to the same problem. A case study
is presented where five irrigation method alternatives in Soke ¨ Plain are assessed by five expert decision-makers
(DMs), based on fifteen evaluation criteria. Sprinkler is found to be the first ranked irrigation method among five
alternatives with both HF-AHP-PROMETHEE II and HF-AHP-TOPSIS resulting in the same ranking. The selection
of this irrigation technique by the expert DMs is compliant with prevailing regional features related to hydrologic, climatic, environmental conditions and with regard to cotton, one of the highest water-consuming crops.