A Cooperative Game Approach for Solving Water Resources Allocation Problem

In water resources allocation problem, different stakeholders are faced with conflicting objectives and an optimal allocation of shared water resources in water transfer projects became an important task, taking into account the utilities of the different stakeholders. In Iran, there is unevenly distribution of water resources as well as increasing water demands, which have brought a need to transfer water from the Karoon river basin to the Rafsanjan basin in central Iran. Therefore, cooperative game theory can be used to analyze these problems, taking the advantage of cooperative games in maximizing the total net benefit of the shared stakeholders as well as increasing the individual shares of the allocated water to each stakeholder. In this paper, two cooperative game models are developed for modeling efficient water allocation among water stakeholders in water allocation problems in southern Iran. The main objective is to reallocate the water resources to achieve an equitable way of distributing these benefits among the water stakeholders to let them have the economic incentives for cooperation. Depending on the type of cooperation and the nature of the payoffs values, a fuzzy and a stochastic cooperative models are presented. The results showed that the models are appropriate in modeling real-world uncertain problems and efficient in allocating benefits specifically when considering the stochastic nature for payoffs.