Comprehensive Assessment of Dam Safety Using a Game-Theory-Based Dam Safety Performance Measure

Abstract

More than 100,000 dams have been built in China and their safety conditions have drawn more attention to the stakeholders due to large socioeconomic effects, such as economic losses and casualties caused by dam incidents. Dam safety assessment was closely related to the safety conditions of various indicators and associated weights. However, traditional methods tended to adopt either the subjective weighting method (SWM) or the objective weighting method (OWM) to assess the weights of indicators, leading to an unreliable assessment of dam safety. To this end, this study proposed the game theory (GT)-based dam safety performance measure (DSPM) method to evaluate the safety level of dams. To assess the weights of all associated indicators of dams, the GT method that was used to capture the advantages of both the SWM and OWM was developed. The weights of each indicator were considered as variables and their values were obtained based on MATLAB. The DSPM that followed the form of the power-exponential function was proposed to assess dam safety. The whole method was exemplified by the five dams and the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified by comparing it with the code-based method (i.e., SL 258-2017). The results showed that the weights of indicators based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and the CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method were different. The maximum and minimum percentage differences between the weights based on AHP and CRITIC methods were 107.4% and 3.1%, respectively, revealing that the weights obtained from only one method were unreliable. The proposed GT method was suitable for assessing the weights. Obtained superiority and inferiority rankings (SIRs) based on the GT-based DSPM and the code-based methods were consistent, which showed the effectiveness of the GT-based DSPM method. The code-based method concerning the dam safety levels was too rough to capture the dam performance accurately; the proposed method gave a more detailed classification, which provided important information on wise investments for the stakeholders when enhancing the performance of deficient dams.