Evaluating the Water Resource Systems Performance Using Fuzzy Reliability, Resilience and Vulnerability

This study highlights the need to improve the estimation of the water resources performance criteria such as reliability, resilience and vulnerability (RRV) regarding common approaches. The study also proposes a new technique to obviate disadvantages of common (classic) approaches. RRV criteria are very useful for evaluating performance of water resources system which are used in many researches in the last three decades. This study explains that common approaches of quantifying these estimators have unreliable performance in thresholds of desired values of parameters under investigation such as water supply. This weak point in previous approaches has been shown by an evident example, demonstrating that this problem could change exact values of reliability, resilience and vulnerability in evaluating the water resource system performance. This would also lead to incredible inaccuracy in evaluating the sustainability index of a water system. This study developed an approach to improve PRV performance criteria for water resource systems performance evaluation. The new relations are based on previous formulas with improvements in their structures using the concept of membership functions in fuzzy theory. The Zayandehrud basin has been used as a case study to compare and assess the new and previous approaches. Comparison of the results of the new proposed approach with those of the common approaches to estimate performance criteria as well as their summaries by sustainability index showed that the new approach is very effective and practical meanwhile eliminating disadvantages of common approach