Multiobjective Planning: Concepts and Methods

Present day water resources planning encompasses social, environmental, and economic objectives in developing and choosing among alternative plans. Recent efforts to operationalize multiobjective planning have engendered a variety of new techniques. Where the emphasis has been on methodological developments, this paper considers how developing methodologies relate to the water resources planning process. In terms of the basic problem of multiobjective analysis, the function of the planning process is seen as integrating technical information from the planning team and social value information from the publics to arrive at a socially preferred alternative. A model of this process is presented and some desired attributes of multiobjective methods to support the process are identified. Several classes of multiobjective methods are described and compared as to their implementation requirements and their characteristics relative to both technical and value aspects of the planning process.