Use of Data Envelopment Analysis as a Multi Criteria Decision Tool – A Case of Irrigation Management

In this paper, the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a tool for Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is investigated for assessing various irrigation management strategies in terms of economic, environmental and social criteria. To carry out this task, an irrigation management research project report is used for the comparison of various MCDM and DEA rankings as well as providing the required data. The DEA methods called Charnes-Cooper-Rhodes (CCR), Banker- Charnes-Cooper (BCC) and Reduced-CCR (RCCR) are employed by the integration of criteria weights through the addition of assurance regions to improve discriminating power of the analysis, and to reach the ranking of strategies. The results indicate that DEA constitutes a valuable approach to be used alternatively or in addition to MCDM, and incorporating managerial preferences into the DEA methods provide correlated results with MCDM techniques.