Application of Decision Analysis to Pollution Control: The Rhine River Study

As water resources are more intensively used and as water quality deteriorates there is an increasing need for improved decision making processes to manage them. Since both economic and social criteria, and several interest groups with often conflicting preferences are involved, multi-dimensional utility functions are employed in the analysis. This paper presents a preliminary application of a model employing several forms of utility functions to the control of water quality on the Rhine River in which optimal treatment levels are found by simultaneously solving a system of non-linear equations. The applicability of additive and multiplicative forms of utility objective functions is studied, and the relation of this model to real world decision making is described