Water Resource Systems in a Regional Development Context

This paper deals with one of the most frequently encountered systems in regional development: namely, water resource systems. Water resources have always been of major importance because of their vital nature. This is why development of a water resource system has always taken place as the first stage of regional development. Furthermore, because of the long history of water resource development one might expect that everything is quite clear and the development of such types of systems is merely a technical question. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although systems analysis has penetrated deeply into the area of water resource systems over the last 20-25 years, much work remains on the structuring of these systems: extracting the main elements of any water resource system; hydrologic, economic and environmental description of the elements; as well as their mutual impact. Moreover, all of the achievements in water resource systems do not seem to have been fully utilized either in systems analysis theory or in practice. In the paper, first of all, an extraction is made of all the possible elements which, hopefully, make up every water resource system. Then, those elements are described (or, for some there is only an intention to be described) in three aspects: hydrological, economical and environmental. After performing those two steps one can proceed further with generation of arbitrary systems in order to choose a particular one. Or one can embed these elements in an existing configuration in order to understand how the system will react to any external/ internal changes as well as investigate the consequences of making any decision in the system