As a city with serious water shortage problem,Tianjin has an urgent need to find new water sources in order to meet the growing demand for water supply.The standby water sources schemes in Tianjin include middle and east routes of south to north water transferring from Yangtze River,importing water from Yellow River,redeploying water from upstream reservoirs of Haihe River,effluent reuse,seawater for direct use,seawater desalination,saline ground water development,etc.In our research,we use analytic hierarchy process to evaluate these schemes with a comprehensive analysis on nine factors,including water supply,difficulty of water source sharing,annual volume of water supply,cost of engineering construction,quality of water,cost of water treatment,cost of water supply pipelines reticulation,handicap of wastewater disposal process and risk of eco-environment.First we analyzed each scheme with the nine factors.Then we used Delphi technique to decide the relative importance of these factors and got a judgment matrix to acquire the weight of them.As a result,seawater desalination got the highest value with the virtue of huge quantity of reserves,high quality of water supply,low ecological and climatic risks and short distance of intake.The middle route water transfer project,saline ground water and direct use of seawater also got higher mark profiting from large reserves,extensive and lower cost.The comparative assessment result indicates that these four schemes are felicitous water sources for municipal utilization in Tianjin.The east route water transfer project,redeploying water from upstream reservoirs and importing water from Yellow River got lower values with disadvantage of water pollution or serious regional contest.They can be only treated as contingent water sources.Although sewage disposal got the lowest mark because of high cost of treatment and supply pipelines construction,sewage treatment must be given priority to be used in irrigation,ecological and landscape demand.