Dynamic modelling of integrated water resources quality management

Basin-scale water resources decisions need to have a decision support system (DSS) that models all water quantity and quality elements. Common integrated water resources management (IWRM) models such as Weap and Modsim can quantitatively model a water system well. However, although certain insertions to such software have been incorporated to simulate quality parameters in rivers, none of these can model such parameters in reservoirs. To solve this issue, researchers have coupled IWRM models with water quality models of reservoirs (WQMRs). WQMRs such as Cequal-W2 usually require voluminous and various input and output information. They are not user friendly and have a high running time. Because of these shortcomings, coupled IWRM and WQMR models cannot be considered as a DSS to assess a variety of scenarios. This paper represents an attempt to introduce a DSS based on the system dynamics approach to utilise in basin-scale integrated water resources quantitative and qualitative management. The proposed model uses a one-dimensional water quality approach for the reservoir to overcome the quality modelling disadvantages of IWRM models. The final results of the proposed model for different scenarios are compared with Modsim and Cequal-W2.