Research challenges in environmental management

Operational Research has been usefully applied to a wide variety of environmental problem areas including water resources management, water quality management, solid wastes operation and design, cost allocation for environmental facilities, and air quality management. Despite almost four decades of such activity, challenging operational research problems remain in all of these areas. The problems include the design of rationing strategies in a system of parallel reservoirs, hydropower production planning from parallel reservoirs, simultaneous siting and efficiency determination of wastewater treatment plants, design of the sequence of facilities in a solid wastes collection/disposal system, the achievement of equity as well as rationality in cost allocation, the planning of cost allocations when demands change in time, and the siting of air quality monitoring stations.