Integrated hydrologic-economic modeling of coalitions of stakeholders for water allocation in the South Saskatchewan River Basin

A real world case study of water and benefit allocation among stakeholders in the South Saskatchewan River Basin in Alberta, Canada, is presented. To be able to carry out this large-scale water basin system investigation, a useful approach, called the integrated hydrologic-economic river basin model, is developed for computing the optimal benefits of water for various coalitions of stakeholders by allocating available water to the members of a given coalition without reducing specified allocations to those outside of the coalition with respect to both water quantity and quality. Monthly net benefit functions for a rich range of different types of demands are employed in the model. Moreover, a separate irrigation water planning model is designed as a submodel to derive the monthly benefit functions of irrigation water uses. Using these calculated values, cooperative game theory is utilized for fairly reallocating water and benefits among stakeholders in the basin study.