Conjunctive Water Resources Management with Emphasis on Environmental Sustainability in Yazd-Ardakan Basin

Due to some factors such as limitations in water resources, increasing needs in these resources in all aspects and also the impact of climate changes on these resources, the optimal management of water resources and efficient use of them is an essential task. To achieve this optimal management, appropriate optimization techniques can be utilized. In this paper, a multi objective model is developed for conjunctive use of ground water and transitive water in Yazd-Ardakan basin. To attain this, optimization approaches including Genetic algorithm (GA) based on penalty function and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II), were used. Three objective functions were developed including, maximizing economic income obtained from water resources considering qualitative aspects the aquifer sustainability, minimizing failure in water supply and balancing aquifer storage. 3-D analysis Mod flow model served to simulate ground water aquifer. The monthly water budget was extracted using 3-D analysis Mod flow model. The findings indicated that NSGA II is prior to GA in optimizing water allocation model. On the other hand, using annual renewable ground water storage, considered in water allocation, instead of using monthly renewable ground water storage resulted in better allocation model performance.