An object-oriented tool for the control of point-source pollution in river systems

Computer-aided management of surface-water quality has been a field of continuous progress in the last decades. Object-orientation offers the potential for the development of efficient software tools, capable of dealing with the complexity of water resources and their policy making. In the present work an object-oriented approach has been developed for the analysis of point-source pollution control in river basins. The physical entities of the river basin and the conceptual entities of its water-quality simulation and control have been represented through objects. With the appropriate distribution of responsibilities among these objects and the specification of their collaborations, the assessment and simulation of river water quality can be performed. Alternative strategies of point-source pollution control can be also evaluated, and an optimised control scheme can be suggested. The above analysis has been implemented in the design and development of an easily extended and flexible software tool, using the object-oriented language Smalltalk Express. The tool has been successfully validated through the studies of the South Nation River Catchment in Canada and the Upper Mersey River Catchment in the United Kingdom. In this work the architecture of the software tool is outlined and the employed mathematical analysis along with the results of the case studies are presented.