Mamdani Fuzzy Inference System for Rating the Performance of Sponge City Programme

China started Sponge City Programme (SCP) to manage urban floods and to improve the quality of water environment in 2015. So far, the first two batches of pilot cities of SCP have been finished construction and two more batches of demonstration cities are ongoing. How to transfer the knowledge which learnt by the pilot cities to other cities is a key problem to enhance both the efficiency and the performance of SCP. This paper introduces the first step to develop a fuzzy system to represent knowledge which is acquired from stakeholders and decision makers, then to transform into if-then rules. This fuzzy logic inference system aims to simulate scenarios of real-life decision making. How to rate the performance of SCP in one city is chosen as an example in this paper. A Mamdani fuzzy inference system is applied, the fuzzy variables and fuzzy rules are hypothetical based on surveys of Qian’an, one of the pilot cities of SCP. Data from Qian’an is used to test and results show that the performance of SCP in Qian’an is good (74.1). The Mamdani fuzzy system is proved to be a powerful tool to represent knowledge and in the future other aspects of knowledge from SCP will be applied.