Coupled planning of water resources and agricultural landuse based on an inexact-stochastic programming model

Water resources are fundamental for support of regional development. Effective planning can facilitate sustainable management of water resources to balance socioeconomic development and water conservation. In this research, coupled planning of water resources and agricultural land use was undertaken through the development of an inexact-stochastic programming approach. Such an inexact modeling approach was the integration of interval linear programming and chance-constraint programming methods. It was employed to successfully tackle uncertainty in the form of interval numbers and probabilistic distributions existing in water resource systems. Then it was applied to a typical regional water resource system for demonstrating its applicability and validity through generating efficient system solutions. Based on the process of modeling formulation and result analysis, the developed model could be used for helping identify optimal water resource utilization patterns and the corresponding agricultural land-use schemes in three sub-regions. Furthermore, a number of decision alternatives were generated under multiple water-supply conditions, which could help decision makers identify desired management policies.