Application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process to irrigation project improvement: Part II. How professionals evaluate an irrigation project for its improvement

Planning improvement of an irrigation project often depends on irrigation professionals who conduct the initial survey of the irrigation project. Accordingly, activities for improvement will be different depending on who evaluates the status quo of the irrigation project, because of the diversity of expertise and experience of professionals. A questionnaire survey was conducted to examine how irrigation professionals evaluate an irrigation project, that is, on what evaluation factors (EFs) they place the importance. In the questionnaire, professionals ranked the relative importance of EFs derived from internal process indicators of the Rapid Appraisal Process (RAP). Answers to the questionnaire were processed by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP, Part I), and then local weights of EFs were obtained as a measure of relative importance of EFs. Those local weights were statistically analyzed by the Anderson–Darling normality test, the F-test and the t-test. Then, they were modeled by probability density functions. The results implied (a) that irrigation professionals give the first priority to water delivery services project-wide and (b) that they consider that irrigation infrastructure (hardware) of primary canals is more important than that of secondary canals. These findings infer that irrigation professionals first consider how well water is controlled and distributed project-wide and second how appropriately primary canals are designed and maintained. Also, their views are divided into two regarding importance of hardware and management, namely some insist that hardware is more important than management and the others insist that management is more important than hardware.