Method for lake eutrophication levels evaluation: TOPSIS-MCS

Abstract

Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) is applied in the engineering with great fuzziness and uncertainty. Technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method is used to deal with multi-criteria decision-making issue. Membership function is used to determine the membership degree of evaluated index. This paper presents the method for lake eutrophication level evaluation. The developed approach merges MCS method, TOPSIS method and membership function. The evaluated results are consistent with real eutrophication level in Lake Erhai, China. Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is conducted. Results show that potassium permanganate index (CODMn) displays the highest negative correlation with the evaluated results and Secchi disc (SD) performs the highest positive correlation under different errors in measured data. The novelty of this work are: (1) the application of TOPSIS considers Surface water environmental quality standards and measured data. Besides, the Monte Carlo simulation method is applied to generate a normal distributed dataset to overcome the errors caused by human and equipment in data collection. The approach is utilized in the article, titled “Approach based on TOPSIS and Monte Carlo simulation methods to evaluate lake eutrophication levels” (Lin et al., 2020) [1].•Developed approach merges TOPSIS and MCS method.•It can increase the reliability of evaluated result.