Economic sharing of basin water resources between competing stakeholders

This paper describes an application of linear programming (LP) methods for optimal allocation of water among competing stakeholders that would achieve the highest economic return from water use in the agricultural section of the Sefidrud Basin, northern Iran. In a network presentation of the basin, the nodes stand for the supply and demand points and arcs represent reaches. The constraints of the LP model are the network structure of the basin (flows, stream geography and channel capacity), the available surface and ground water in each node, the environmental demand in different reaches, upper and lower bands of supply in each node and water balances.