Chance-constrained/stochastic linear programming model for acid rain abatement—I. Complete colinearity and noncolinearity

Abstract

A Linear Programming model is presented for development of acid rain abatement strategies in eastern North America. For a system comprised of 235 large controllable point sources and 83 uncontrolled area sources, it determines the least-cost method of reducing SO 2 emissions to satisfy maximum wet sulfur deposition limits at 20 sensitive receptor locations. In this paper, the purely deterministic model is extended to a probabilistic form by incorporating the effects of meteorologic variability on the long-range pollutant transport processes. These processes are represented by source-receptor-specific transfer coefficients. Experiments for quantifying the spatial variability of transfer coefficients showed their distributions to be approximately lognormal with logarithmic standard deviations consistently about unity. Three methods of incorporating second-moment random variable uncertainty into the deterministic LP framework are described: Two-Stage Programming Under Uncertainty (LPUU), Chance-Constrained Programming (CCP) and Stochastic Linear Programming (SLP). A composite CCP-SLP model is developed which embodies the two-dimensional characteristics of transfer coefficient uncertainty. Two probabilistic formulations are described involving complete colinearity and complete noncolinearity for the transfer coefficient covariance-correlation structure. Complete colinearity assumes complete dependence between transfer coefficients. Complete noncolinearity assumes complete independence. The completely colinear and noncolinear formulations are considered extreme bounds in a meteorologic sense and yield abatement strategies of largely didactic value. Such strategies can be characterized as having excessive costs and undesirable deposition results in the completely colinear case and absence of a clearly defined system risk level (other than expected-value) in the noncolinear formulation.