The Influence of Objective Function and Acceptability Threshold on Uncertainty Assessment of an Urban Drainage Hydraulic Model with Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation Methodology

Wei Zhang () and Tian Li ()

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2015, vol. 29, issue 6, 2059-2072

Abstract: Urban drainage model is an important computer-aided tool in stormwater management and drainage planning and designing. A popular urban drainage hydraulic model, stormwater management model (SWMM), was applied in a pump lifting combined sewer system for a high-intensity urban catchment located in Shanghai, China. Uncertainty of SWMM water quantity parameters was assessed with generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) methodology. The sensitivity of parameters was discussed and compared based on the results of uncertainty analysis. To discuss the influence of the acceptability threshold on model parameter sensitivity and the margin of uncertainty band, the GLUE approach was applied several times varying acceptability threshold. The results indicated that a higher acceptability threshold value is contributed to achieve a stricter verification with a high confidence level, and the uncertainty analysis significant level can be featured by the value of acceptability threshold. The selection of acceptability threshold value can be regarded as a tradeoff process. Both reducing the low efficient simulation and reducing computation cost should be considered for the selection of acceptability threshold. Moreover, the GLUE approach was applied several times varying different objective functions with corresponding acceptability thresholds. The results indicated that some parameters may be sensitive to a specific objective function, and other parameters may be sensitive to another objective function. Some parameters cannot easily identified when a single objective function was used within the GLUE approach, and a multiple-objective function combined different objective functions requirements, may be a alternative approach to reduce the model prediction uncertainty. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Combined sewer system; Objective function; Acceptability threshold; Uncertainty analysis; Stormwater management model (SWMM); Generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11269-015-0928-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:29:y:2015:i:6:p:2059-2072

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-0928-8

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().