Water quality management in a wetland system using an inexact left-hand-side chance-constrained fuzzy multi-objective approach

Water quality management is a significant item in the sustainable development of wetland system, since the environmental influences from the economic development are becoming more and more obvious. In this study, an inexact left-hand-side chance-constrained fuzzy multi-objective programming (ILCFMOP) approach was proposed and applied to water quality management in a wetland system to analyze the tradeoffs among multiple objectives of total net benefit, water quality, water resource utilization and water treatment cost. The ILCFMOP integrates interval programming, left-hand-side chance-constrained programming, and fuzzy multi-objective programming within an optimization framework. It can both handle multiple objectives and quantify multiple uncertainties, including fuzziness (aspiration level of objectives), randomness (pollutant release limitation), and interval parameters (e.g. water resources, and wastewater treatment costs). A representative water pollution control case study in a wetland system is employed for demonstration. The optimal schemes were analyzed under scenarios at different probabilities (pi, denotes the admissible probability of violating the constraint i). The optimal solutions indicated that, most of the objectives would decrease with increasing probability levels from scenarios 1 to 3, since a higher constraint satisfaction probability would lead to stricter decision scopes. This study is the first application of the ILCFMOP model to water quality management in a wetland system, which indicates that it is applicable to other environmental problems under uncertainties.