Reorganization of water demand under changing conditions with possibilistic programming

Abstract

To adapt water resources management to changing conditions, the amount of water allocated to the different demands may be redistributed to satisfy water availability constraints. To achieve this, an interactive possibilistic programming procedure is proposed. The main criterion for the reorganization of water allocation to irrigation demands is net water productivity. To cope with uncertainty in problem formulation, the decision variables (amount of water allocated to each demand) are considered fuzzy triangular numbers. The proposed methodology is a combination of an intensive simulation process that determines the maximum cumulative potential water withdrawal with an interactive flexible possibilistic approach. The use of multicriteria techniques can be easily included within the interactive process in order to face the fuzziness of the water productivity term and to improve the final decision incorporating several dimensionals. The proposed method is applied to a real and complex problem, the Guadalquivir River Basin District in Spain, to identify an adaptive water resources management scheme that can react to the projected climate change scenarios by reorganizing the water allocated to irrigation demands.