Assessment of River Water Quality Based on Theory of Variable Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzy Binary Comparison Method

There has been an increasing need for the proper evaluation of river water quality in order to safeguard public health and to protect the valuable fresh water resources. In order to overcome the own limitations of the traditional evaluations which can only use a point value instead of an interval for grading standards, on the basis of the fuzzy binary comparison method (FBCM) and the theory of variable fuzzy sets (VFS), an integrated variable fuzzy evaluation model (VFEM) is proposed for the assessment of river water quality in this paper. This model possesses the preciseness of the algorithm and operability in practice, can well solve the grading standards which are interval form. In order to explore and compare the present method with other traditional methods, two cases studies in the Three Gorges and Tseng-Wen River are made. The results show that the proposed VFEM method can convey water cleanliness to certain degree by using the eigenvector of level H, which is much stricter in the superior level, and that it can improve the veracity for the assessment of water quality. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014