Methodological review of multicriteria optimization techniques: aplications in water resources

Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is an umbrella approach that has been applied to a wide range of natural resource management situations. This report has two purposes. First, it aims to provide an overview of advancedmulticriteriaapproaches, methods and tools. The review seeks to layout the nature of the models, their inherent strengths and limitations. Analysis of their applicability in supporting real-life decision-making processes is provided with relation to requirements imposed by organizationally decentralized and economically specific spatial and temporal frameworks. Models are categorized based on different classification schemes and are reviewed by describing their general characteristics, approaches, and fundamental properties. A necessity of careful structuring of decision problems is discussed regarding planning, staging and control aspects within broader agricultural context, and in water management in particular. A special emphasis is given to the importance of manipulating decision elements by means ofhierarchingand clustering. The review goes beyond traditionalMCDAtechniques; it describes new modelling approaches. The second purpose is to describe newMCDAparadigms aimed at addressing the inherent complexity of managing water ecosystems, particularly with respect to multiple criteria integrated with biophysical models,multistakeholders, and lack of information. Comments about, and critical analysis of, the limitations of traditional models are made to point out the need for, and propose a call to, a new way of thinking aboutMCDAas they are applied to water and natural resources management planning. These new perspectives do not undermine the value of traditional methods; rather they point to a shift in emphasis from methods for problem solving to methods for problem structuring. Literature review show successfully integrations of watershed management optimization models to efficiently screen a broad range of technical, economic, and policy management options within a watershed system framework and select the optimal combination of management strategies and associated water allocations for designing a sustainable watershed management plan at least cost. Papers show applications in watershed management model that integrates both natural and human elements of a watershed system including the management of ground and surface water sources, water treatment and distribution systems, human demands,wastewatertreatment and collection systems, water reuse facilities,nonpotablewater distribution infrastructure, aquifer storage and recharge facilities, storm water, and land use

Tasks for Agent-Based Negotiation Teams:Analysis, Review, and Challenges

An agent-based negotiation team is a group of interdependent agents that join together as a single negotiation party due to their shared interests in the negotiation at hand. The reasons to employ an agent-based negotiation team may vary: (i) more computation and parallelization capabilities, (ii) unite agents with different expertise and skills whose joint work makes it possible to tackle complex negotiation domains, (iii) the necessity to represent different stakeholders or different preferences in the same party (e.g., organizations, countries, and married couple). The topic of agent-based negotiation teams has been recently introduced in multi-agent research. Therefore, it is necessary to identify good practices, challenges, and related research that may help in advancing the state-of-the-art in agent-based negotiation teams. For that reason, in this article we review the tasks to be carried out by agent-based negotiation teams. Each task is analyzed and related with current advances in different research areas. The analysis aims to identify special challenges that may arise due to the particularities of agent-based negotiation teams.Comment: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 201

State-of-the-Art Report on Systems Analysis Methods for Resolution of Conflicts in Water Resources Management

Water is an important factor in conflicts among stakeholders at the local, regional, and even international level. Water conflicts have taken many forms, but they almost always arise from the fact that the freshwater resources of the world are not partitioned to match the political borders, nor are they evenly distributed in space and time. Two or more countries share the watersheds of 261 major rivers and nearly half of the land area of the wo rld is in international river basins. Water has been used as a military and political goal. Water has been a weapon of war. Water systems have been targets during the war. A role of systems approach has been investigated in this report as an approach for resolution of conflicts over water. A review of systems approach provides some basic knowledge of tools and techniques as they apply to water management and conflict resolution. Report provides a classification and description of water conflicts by addressing issues of scale, integrated water management and the role of stakeholders. Four large-scale examples are selected to illustrate the application of systems approach to water conflicts: (a) hydropower development in Canada; (b) multipurpose use of Danube river in Europe; (c) international water conflict between USA and Canada; and (d) Aral See in Asia. Water conflict resolution process involves various sources of uncertainty. One section of the report provides some examples of systems tools that can be used to address objective and subjective uncertainties with special emphasis on the utility of the fuzzy set theory. Systems analysis is known to be driven by the development of computer technology. Last section of the report provides one view of the future and systems tools that will be used for water resources management. Role of the virtual databases, computer and communication networks is investigated in the context of water conflicts and their resolution.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wrrr/1005/thumbnail.jp

Many-objective design of reservoir systems - Applications to the Blue Nile

This work proposes a multi-criteria optimization-based approach for supporting the negotiated design of multireservoir systems. The research addresses the multi-reservoir system design problem (selecting among alternative options, reservoir sizing), the capacity expansion problem (timing the activation of new assets and the filling of new large reservoirs) and management of multi-reservoir systems at various expansion stages. The aim is to balance multiple long and short-term performance objectives of relevance to stakeholders with differing interests. The work also investigates how problem re-formulations can be used to improve computational efficiency at the design and assessment stage and proposes a framework for post-processing of many objective optimization results to facilitate negotiation among multiple stakeholders. The proposed methods are demonstrated using the Blue Nile in a suite of proof-of-concept studies. Results take the form of Pareto-optimal trade-offs where each point on the curve or surface represents the design of water resource systems (i.e., asset choice, size, implementation dates of reservoirs, and operating policy) and coordination strategies (e.g., cost sharing and power trade) where further benefits in one measure necessarily come at the expense of another. Technical chapters aim to offer practical Nile management and/or investment recommendations deriving from the analysis which could be refined in future more detailed studies

Spatial optimisation for resilient infrastructure services

Ph. D. Thesis.Infrastructure networks provide crucial services to the functioning of human settlements. Extreme weather events, especially flooding, can lead to disruption or complete loss of these crucial infrastructure services, which can have significant impacts on people’s health and wellbeing, as well as being costly to repair. Urban areas concentrate infrastructure and people, and are consequently particularly sensitive to disruptions due to natural (and human-made) disasters. Flooding alone constituted 47% of all weather-related disasters between 1995 and 2015, causing enormous loss of lives and economic damages. Climate change is projected to further exacerbate the impacts that natural disasters have on cities. Choices about where to site infrastructure have a significant impact on the impacts of extreme weather events. For example, investments in flood risk management have typically focussed on prioritising interventions to protect people, houses and businesses. Protection of infrastructure services has either been a bonus benefit of flood defence protection of property, or been implemented by individual infrastructure operators. Spatial planning is a key process to influence the distribution of people and activities over broad spatial scales. However, decision-making processes to locate infrastructure services does not typically consider resilience issues at broad spatial scales which can lead to inefficient use of resources. Moreover, spatial planning typically requires consideration of multiple, sometimes competing, objectives with solutions that are not readily tractable. Balancing multiple trade-offs in spatial planning with multiple variables at high spatial resolution is computationally demanding. This research has developed a new framework for multi-objective Pareto-optimal location-allocation problems solving. The RAO (Resource Allocation Optimisation) framework developed here is a heuristic approach that makes use of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to produce Pareto-optimal spatial plans that balance a typical tradeoff in spatial planning: the maximisation of accessibility of a given infrastructure service vs the minimisation of the costs of providing that service. The method is applied to two case studies: (i) Storage of temporary flood defences, and (ii) Location of healthcare facilities. The RAO is first applied to a flood risk management case study in the Humber Estuary, UK, to optimise the strategic allocation of storing space for emergency resources (like temporary flood barriers, portable generators, pumps etc.) by maximising the accessibility of warehouses (i.e. minimising travel times from storing locations to deployment sites) and minimising costs. The evaluation of costs involves both capital and operational costs such as the length of temporary defences needed, storage site locations, number of lorries and personnel to enable their deployment, and maintenance costs. A baseline is tested against a number of scenarios, including a flood disrupting road network and thereby deployment operations, as well as variable infrastructure and land use costs, different transportation and deployment strategies and changing the priority of protecting different critical infrastructures. Key findings show investment in strategically located warehouses decreases deployment time across the whole region by several hours, while prioritising the protection of the infrastructure assets serving larger shares of population can cut costs by 30%. Moreover, the analysis of the ensemble of all scenarios provides crucial insights for spatial planners. For example, storage sites in Hull or Hedon, and in the areas of Withernsea and Drax are robust choices under all scenarios. Meanwhile, the Humber Bridge is shown to play a crucial role in enabling regional coverage of temporary barriers. The second case study shows how emergency response strategies can be enhanced by optimal allocation of healthcare facilities at a regional scale. The RAO framework allocates healthcare facilities in Northland (New Zealand) balancing the trade-off between maximisation of accessibility (i.e. minimisation of travel times between households and GP clinics) and minimisation of costs (i.e. number of clinics and doctors). Results show how c.80% of Northland’s population lives within a 20 minutes drive from the closest GP, but this can be increased to 90% with strategic investment and relocation of doctors and clinics. By accounting for flood and landslide risk, the RAO is used to identify strategies that improve accessibility to healthcare services by up to 5% even during extreme events (when compared to the current business as usual service accessibility). Application to these two problems demonstrates that the RAO framework can identify optimal strategies to deploy finite resources to maximise the resilience of infrastructure services. Moreover, it provides an analytical appreciation of the sensitivity between planning tradeoffs and therefore the overall robustness of a strategy to uncertainty. The method is consequently of benefit to local authorities, infrastructure operators and agencies responsible for disaster management. Following successful application to regional scale case studies, it is recommended that future work scale the analysis to consider resource allocation to protect infrastructure at a national scaleEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Counci

Computer-based tools for supporting forest management. The experience and the expertise world-wide

Report of Cost Action FP 0804 Forest Management Decision Support Systems (FORSYS)Computer-based tools for supporting forest management. The experience and the expertise world-wide answers a call from both the research and the professional communities for a synthesis of current knowledge about the use of computerized tools in forest management planning. According to the aims of the Forest Management Decision Support Systems (FORSYS) (http://fp0804.emu.ee/) this synthesis is a critical success factor to develop a comprehensive quality reference for forest management decision support systems. The emphasis of the book is on identifying and assessing the support provided by computerized tools to enhance forest management planning in real-world contexts. The book thus identifies the management planning problems that prevail world-wide to discuss the architecture and the components of the tools used to address them. Of importance is the report of architecture approaches, models and methods, knowledge management and participatory planning techniques used to address specific management planning problems. We think that this synthesis may provide effective support to research and outreach activities that focus on the development of forest management decision support systems. It may contribute further to support forest managers when defining the requirements for a tool that best meets their needs. The first chapter of the book provides an introduction to the use of decision support systems in the forest sector and lays out the FORSYS framework for reporting the experience and expertise acquired in each country. Emphasis is on the FORSYS ontology to facilitate the sharing of experiences needed to characterize and evaluate the use of computerized tools when addressing forest management planning problems. The twenty six country reports share a structure designed to underline a problem-centric focus. Specifically, they all start with the identification of the management planning problems that are prevalent in the country and they move on to the characterization and assessment of the computerized tools used to address them. The reports were led by researchers with background and expertise in areas that range from ecological modeling to forest modeling, management planning and information and communication technology development. They benefited from the input provided by forest practitioners and by organizations that are responsible for developing and implementing forest management plans. A conclusions chapter highlights the success of bringing together such a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. This book benefited from voluntary contributions by 94 authors and from the involvement of several forest stakeholders from twenty six countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia over a three-year period. We, the chair of FORSYS and the editorial committee of the publication, acknowledge and thank for the valuable contributions from all authors, editors, stakeholders and FORSYS actors involved in this project

Regional forestry sector modelling of options for industrial forest plantations in Indonesia

Regional resource planning and decision-making for industrial forest plantation development increasingly involves participation by members of the public. Motivation to maximise or minimise the degree to which groups with various interests can satisfy their individual objectives should recognise outcomes arrived at in a consensus decision-making environment. In this study, a planning framework is devised and adopted, which describes a regional planning system prepared in order to assist in the design and evaluation of strategic industrial forest plantation development in Indonesia. The central component of this planning system is interactive Multi-Objective Decision Making (MODM) modelling with linkages between optimisation and simulation models. The framework of the whole planning system demonstrates the capability and feasibility of resolving important and conflicting objectives through discussion and communicative decision processes that can be reinforced with modelling sensitivity outputs. In other words, a methodology is developed that allows strategic options for plantation planning to be analysed interactively. The MODM models here are MINMAX and MINSUM goal programming formulations. This model has various features that characterise industrial forest plantation development planning, including physical production, social, economic, environmental, and location aspects. This formulation, moreover, has several advantages such as capturing the essence of the multi-objective decision making problem, encompassing the entire range of feasible tradeoffs among all objectives through parametric programming in order to derive forestland allocations optimally, as well as serving important implementable and practical interests. A minimum economic size (MES) spreadsheet-based model is run to determine profitable plantation sizes by using financial criteria such as IRR and NPV. The MES model outputs are then incorporated within MODM models. A major part of the research reported here was to develop a way of transferring data between simulation and LP models directly through file transfers, and transferring LP derived solutions directly back to the simulation model. This linkage has several advantages: for example, theoretically optimal LP solutions are usually unrealistic in practical or implementational terms because of administrative, social, environmental and other similar problems facing forest management; whereas simulation allows one to explore the effects of deviations from "optimal" LP solutions, and to simulate both in more detail and in broader aggregations of things such as age classes, log types and locations. If measures, e.g. wood and financial flows, are unsatisfactory, some constraints are modified and formed for the relevant LP model utilising, for example, the future log assortment flow consequences and the tradeoffs among them. The automated linkage between optimisation and simulation models provides easy data and solution transfers so that decision makers and stakeholders may gain detailed insights before any consensus decisions need to be made. A geographic information system (GIS) is utilised to enhance pictorially the preferred solutions, information, and appearance. The whole planning system is demonstrated and tested in an indicative case study. The results display the major advantages of consistency, clarity and simplicity of the approach to regional forestland allocation. The framework and results at this stage are only preliminary, because some data are still incomplete and unrefined. This study is, therefore, an initial description and explanation of methodology and an indication of the nature of desirable results rather than a firm policy recommendation pertaining to the case study area. In principle, the framework could also become multi-temporal by creating each variable in a time-dependent fashion. The planning system developed has the ability to incorporate social, financial, environmental, and technical variables in a comprehensive participatory development process. The ultimate value of the quantitative information represented in this framework (or methodology) through a background case study analysis is its ability to facilitate policy formulation to satisfy decision-makers and stakeholders when making informed choices in fundamental management decisions