Agent Based Modelling for Water Resource Allocation in the Transboundary Nile River

Ning Ding,Rasool Erfani,Tohid Erfani,Hamid Mokhtar

doi:10.3390/w8040139

Ning Ding, Rasool Erfani + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/w8040139

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Abstract

Water resource allocation is the process of assessing and determining a mechanism on how water should be distributed among different regions, sectors and users. Over the recent decades, the optimal solution for water resource allocation has been explored both in centralised and decentralised mechanisms. Conventional approaches are under central planner suggesting a solution which maximises total welfare to the users. Moving towards the decentralised modelling, the techniques consider individuals as if they act selfishly in their own favour. While central planner provides an efficient solution, it may not be acceptable for some selfish agents. The contrary is true as well in decentralised solution, where the solution lacks efficiency leading to an inefficient usage of provided resources. This paper develops a parallel evolutionary search algorithm to introduce a mechanism in re-distributing the central planner revenue value among the competing agents based on their contribution to the central solution. The result maintains the efficiency and is used as an incentive for calculating a fair revenue for each agent. The framework is demonstrated and discussed to allocate water resources along the Nile river basin, where there exist eleven competing users represented as agents in various sectors with upstream-downstream relationships and different water demands and availability.

Highlights

Water scarcity, population growth and lack of proper resource allocation mechanisms tend to cause regional instability [1]
The centralised system by a central planner (CP) has been a standard water management approach, by which the whole water basin is modelled as a centralised system and water is distributed for maximising the total benefit of users
Centralised Solution In CP model, the fitness function is the aggregated benefit of all countries and, the problem is to search the maximum value of system revenue

Summary

Introduction

Population growth and lack of proper resource allocation mechanisms tend to cause regional instability [1]. Centralised system techniques assume that all agents will allocate the water among each other such that their aggregate welfare is maximised [2,3,4] In this mechanism, the water is allocated to achieve the equal marginal return for all the users. An example of using a multi-agent system is developed in [9], and is further extended in allocation of water in the Yellow river basin [10] and is used to compare administrative and market based water allocation [11] This approach considers all users as individual agents making decisions by interacting with each other and a coordinator who resolves the users’

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