Principal Investigator: Gerald J. Thuesen (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Sponsor: GWRI
Start Date: 1970-07-01; Completion Date: 1971-06-30;
Keywords:
Description:
When decisions are made to allocate resources for the development and construction of water related projects, it is critical that the implications of water quality be specifically understood. Because the meaning of water quality is rather subjective it has been difficult for water planners to objectively translate the public’s attitudes and conceptions about water quality into objective criteria that would be useful for the evaluation of various alternative courses of action. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate methods that would provide the decision-maker more useful and objective information about water quality. The primary objective is accomplished by investigating the following three questions.
1. How should one develop an assessment structure for quantatively considering the impact of water quality?
2. What is the value of the information provided by the assessment structure and how might this value be quantified?
3. Once an assessment structure is developed and measures of performance are established, how should the information be displayed and what decision rules are appropriate for assessing preferences between alternatives?
A systematic procedure for developing a multiple objective assessment structure is presented so that water quality can be incorporated into the planning process as a multivariate consideration. Although the economic effects of water quality are significant the primary emphasis of this study is to identify and quantify the non-monetary factors of water quality which have an impact on the public.