Water Science & Technology Vol 66 No 3 pp 487–493 © IWA Publishing 2012 doi:10.2166/wst.2012.182

Assessment of urban water security based on catastrophe theory

Fengshun Yang, Dongguo Shao, Chun Xiao and Xuezhi Tan

In this study, a model for assessing urban water security is developed using an evaluation method of catastrophe theory. To overcome the defects of the traditional catastrophe evaluation method, two aspects of improvement are assessed. One is expanding the scope of application of the traditional catastrophe approach, i.e., new normalization formulae for five lower level indicators contained in the index at the higher level is proposed in theory. The other is solving the problem that the synthetic values are generally high and the differences are not obvious based on the theories of Cramer's Rule and Vander monde determinant. The assessment results in Wuhan city are in good agreement with the actual situation. The comparison between the results of the improved method and a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method verifies the science and reliability of the developed method. Consequently, it is concluded that the improved method can be an effective tool for assessment of urban water security and provide a valuable reference for improving inadequacies in urban water security.

Keywords: catastrophe theory; Cramer's rule; normalization formula; urban water security; Vander monde determinant

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