MULTIPLE CRITERIA ANALYSIS FOR WATER QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN THE NITRA BASIN.

BSTRACT: This paper presents the implementation of one element of a decision support system (DSS) for regional water quality management, applied to the Nitra River Basin in Slovakia. A model-based, aspiration-led methodology for multicriteria decision support has been used for the study. Several reusable, modular software tools have been developed and implemented: a problem-specific generator to produce the core part of the mathematical programming model, tools for the generation and interactive modification of multicriteria problems, and a solver for the resulting mixed-integer optimization problem. Provided in the paper are the following: a complete formulation of the mathematical model (including the imbedded water quality model), a summary of the aspiration-reservation-led multiple criteria optimization approach applied to decision support, and an overview of results that illustrate the applied approach and provide some interesting insights to the case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]