Assessment and diagnosis of regional agricultural drought resilience (RADR) is an important groundwork to identify the shortcomings of regional agriculture to resist drought disasters accurately. In order to quantitatively assess the capacity of regional agriculture system to reduce losses from drought disasters under complex conditions and to identify vulnerability indexes, an assessment and diagnosis model for RADR was established. Firstly, this model used the improved fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to determine the index weights, then proposed an assessment method based on connection number and an improved connection entropy. Furthermore, the set pair potential based on subtraction was used to diagnose the vulnerability indexes. In addition, a practical application had been carried out in the region of the Huaibei Plain in Anhui Province. The evaluation results showed that the RADR in this area from 2005 to 2014 as a whole was in a relatively weak situation. However, the average grade values had decreased from 3.144 to 2.790 during these 10 years and the RADR had an enhanced tendency. Moreover, the possibility of RADR enhancement for six cities in this region decreased from east to west, and the drought emergency condition was the weak link of the RADR in the Huaibei Plain.
Keywords: Huaibei Plain; assessment and diagnosis; connection entropy; regional agricultural drought resilience; set pair potential; vulnerability index.