It is important to comprehensively evaluate and monitor urban drinking water quality to ensure a safe and clean drinking water supply. This paper discusses evaluating, analyzing and monitoring of urban drinking water quality and application systematically and proposes a multiple criteria decision-making model, which integrates analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Kullback–Leibler divergence ratio (KLDR) and comprehensive weighted index (CWI) method to eval-
uate the quality of drinking water comprehensively. AHP method and KLDR are employed to distribute reasonable weight to indices, and CWI method is used to get com-prehensive score of multiple criteria system for evaluation. Association analysis is used to find the useful association rules between criteria and drinking water quality. Geographic information system (GIS) technology is employed to show the distribution map of drinking water quality visually. The proposed method is applied to real-time comprehensive eval- uation and visualized monitoring of drinking water quality in Shanghai City. The distribution map of drinking water quality based on GIS can provide monitoring and government agen-cies with an overall assessment and enable them to make better informed decisions. Real-time application shows that the proposed methods are effective for the assessment and monitoring of urban water quality.