Development and Application of Multiobjective Fuzzy Waste Load Allocation Model

Water quality management though a very important part of overall water resources management programs is also unfortunately given the last priority among all the other objectives like water supply for irrigation, drinking purpose, hydropower, flood mitigation etc. In the present paper a multiobjective waste load allocation (MOWLA) model has been developed. Though there are many MOWLA models with cost minimization and DO maximization, there are very few models which have adequately addressed the issues of equity in waste load allocation models. The present paper includes equity as one of the objective and shows that by introducing equity in the objective function the solution obtained is more fair when compared to the overall cost minimization solution. However the decision maker has different satisfaction levels to different solutions. To address this uncertainty or ambiguity in a decision maker’s (DM) satisfaction level, fuzzy membership functions are introduced for each objective function. thus by introducing fuzziness in the objective functions, a modeler can give a wide range solutions from which the DM can select the most satisfying solution for himself.