Water Resour Manage (2009) 23:3207–3220 DOI 10.1007/s11269-009-9430-5 Consideration of Trends in Evaluating Inter-basin Water Transfer Alternatives within a Fuzzy Decision Making Framework Li Xuesen · Wang Bende · Rajeshwar Mehrotra · Ashish Sharma · Wang Guoli Received: 11 July 2008 / Accepted: 5 March 2009 / Published online: 24 March 2009 © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 Abstract Evaluation of water supply schemes is an essential task for meeting the goals of inter-basin water transfer project system management. In general, water supply operation involves multi-objective and multifactor optimization and decision. In recent years, multicriterion decision making (MCDM) has emerged as an effective methodology due to its ability to combine quantitative and qualitative criteria for selection of the best alternative. This paper presents a new optimization method using fuzzy pattern recognition to appraise the water supply decision schemes in inter-basin diversion systems. The proposed method is capable to incorporate not only the will of the decision-makers but also the future development trend of water resources and water supply demand and makes the optimization results more reasonable and applicable. One case study for the Xi-River-to -Tanghe Reservoir Water Transfer Project System in China is presented to demonstrate the application of this method. Keywords Fuzzy pattern recognition model · Weigh trend coefficient · Optimization of water supply scheme · Water supply of diversion system · Inter-basin water transfer L. Xuesen (B ) · W. Bende · W. Guoli School of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China e-mail: syaulj1980@163.com L. Xuesen Management Bureau of Tanghe Reservoir, Liaoyang, 111000, China R. Mehrotra · A. Sharma School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia