This study applied AHP method to identify malfunctioning reservoirs for efficient management of reservoirs, and to verify applicability of this method. 11 supplemental reservoirs located in Andong branch of the Korea Rural Community Corporation(KRC) were selected for this application. Evaluation criteria were developed based on field experiences of the agricultural water management experts, and were surveyed the important criteria of the selection of malfunctioning reservoirs and priority weights of each criteria by expert group under a stepwise hierarchical approach. Then, the result of this method was compared with the scoring method in order to verify its applicability. The outcomes of this study are followings.

1. The important criteria for the decision of malfunctioning reservoirs were obtained as current benefit area, disaster risk, reservoir efficiency decrease, future water demand, resident needs, and available water storage, arranged in order of priority. It is suggested that additional criteria were required to be considered for making decision of malfunctioning reservoirs apart from the traditional criteria including benefit area, resident needs, and economic analysis, in order to achieve efficient management of reservoirs in a long term perspective.

2. It was found that no much differences of the results and positive correlation were obtained between the AHP method and the scoring method from the comparison of the determined weights of two methods. The little difference of results between them may be resulted from subjective decision of the evaluation criteria by expert group.

3. The results of this study implies that the AHP method can be used as objective decision making technique for determination of the priority order of malfunctioning reservoirs. Especially, it can be utilized for quantification of evaluation criteria in the case of no many participants involved for the decision making.

4. It is important to perform the survey with consistency of making decision to avoid undesirable decision making. The AHP method can be effective tool for achieving best solution among various alternatives as long as satisfying the consistency of making decision during the survey. This method also can be very useful in a sense of overcoming limitation of traditional decision-making process of reservoir management policy, and highly applicable to have reasonable selection and management especially in the increase of malfunctioning reservoirs in the future.