Stakeholder engagement in multi-objective optimization of water quality monitoring network, case study: Karkheh Dam reservoir

Reservoir water quality is important for water quality management downstream. A hierarchical approach is developed to present the monitoring locations within a format that satisfies the objectives of social stakeholders for making final decisions. First, a CE-QUAL-W2 model is applied to simulate water quality variables in the reservoir for a long time using a set of historic data. Second, transinformation entropy theory is used to quantify mutual information among a set of monitoring stations for each water quality variable. Then, a non-dominating sorting genetic algorithm-based model is developed for multi-objective optimization of the water quality monitoring network. Finally, a social choice method is applied to the identified non-dominated solutions to achieve a strategy that is compromised among stakeholders. The variations of the water quality variables at different depths and different seasons are investigated. The proposed approach is illustrated for Karkheh Reservoir in Iran. The number of optimized monitoring stations is the same for all seasons (three out of 22 potential stations) using different social choice methods. The results show the appropriate performance of the proposed methodology for optimization of reservoir water quality monitoring stations.