Publications
149 results found
Farhidi F, Madani K, 2015, A Game Theoretic Analysis of the Conflict over Iran's Nuclear Program, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Publisher: IEEE COMPUTER SOC, Pages: 617-622, ISSN: 1062-922X
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- Citations: 6
Madani K, 2014, Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Vol: 4, Pages: 315-328, ISSN: 2190-6483
Despite having a more advanced water management system than most Middle Eastern countries, similar to the other countries in the region, Iran is experiencing a serious water crisis. The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic. However, the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia. Iran has suffered from a symptom-based management paradigm, which mainly focuses on curing the problem symptoms rather than addressing the main causes. This paper reviews the current status of water resources in Iran and recognizes three major causes for the current water crisis: (1) rapid population growth and inappropriate spatial population distribution; (2) inefficient agriculture sector; and (3) mismanagement and thirst for development. The country is faced with serious challenges in the water sector, including but not limited to rising water demand and shortage, declining groundwater levels, deteriorating water quality, and increasing ecosystem losses. If immediate actions are not taken to address these issues, the situation could become more tragic in the near future. The paper suggests some crisis exit strategies that need to be immediately adopted to secure sustainable water resources, if Iran does not want to lose its international reputation for significant success in water resources management over thousands of years in an arid area of the world.
Madani K, Hooshyar M, 2014, A game theory-reinforcement learning (GT-RL) method to develop optimal operation policies for multi-operator reservoir systems, JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGY, Vol: 519, Pages: 732-742, ISSN: 0022-1694
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- Citations: 77
Zavichi A, Madani K, Xanthopoulos P, et al., 2014, Enhanced crane operations in construction using service request optimization, AUTOMATION IN CONSTRUCTION, Vol: 47, Pages: 69-77, ISSN: 0926-5805
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- Citations: 27
Mirchi A, Watkins DW, Huckins CJ, et al., 2014, Water resources management in a homogenizing world: Averting the Growth and Underinvestment trajectory, Water Resources Research, Vol: 50, Pages: 7515-7526, ISSN: 1944-7973
Biotic homogenization, a de facto symptom of a global biodiversity crisis, underscores theurgency of reforming water resources management to focus on the health and viability of ecosystems.Global population and economic growth, coupled with inadequate investment in maintenance of ecologicalsystems, threaten to degrade environmental integrity and ecosystem services that support the global socioeconomicsystem, indicative of a system governed by the Growth and Underinvestment (G&U) archetype.Water resources management is linked to biotic homogenization and degradation of system integritythrough alteration of water systems, ecosystem dynamics, and composition of the biota. Consistent withthe G&U archetype, water resources planning primarily treats ecological considerations as exogenous constraintsrather than integral, dynamic, and responsive parts of the system. It is essential that the ecologicalconsiderations be made objectives of water resources development plans to facilitate the analysis of feedbacksand potential trade-offs between socioeconomic gains and ecological losses. We call for expediting ashift to ecosystem-based management of water resources, which requires a better understanding of thedynamics and links between water resources management actions, ecological side-effects, and associatedlong-term ramifications for sustainability. To address existing knowledge gaps, models that include dynamicsand estimated thresholds for regime shifts or ecosystem degradation need to be developed. Policy leversfor implementation of ecosystem-based water resources management include shifting away fromgrowth-oriented supply management, better demand management, increased public awareness, and institutionalreform that promotes adaptive and transdisciplinary management approaches.
Gohari A, Bozorgi A, Madani K, et al., 2014, Adaptation of surface water supply to climate change in central Iran, JOURNAL OF WATER AND CLIMATE CHANGE, Vol: 5, Pages: 391-407, ISSN: 2040-2244
Madani K, Zarezadeh M, Morid S, 2014, A new framework for resolving conflicts over transboundary rivers using bankruptcy methods, HYDROLOGY AND EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCES, Vol: 18, Pages: 3055-3068, ISSN: 1027-5606
Madani K, Sheikhmohammady M, Mokhtari S, et al., 2014, Social Planner's Solution for the Caspian Sea Conflict, GROUP DECISION AND NEGOTIATION, Vol: 23, Pages: 579-596, ISSN: 0926-2644
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- Citations: 34
Madani K, Read L, Shalikarian L, 2014, Voting Under Uncertainty: A Stochastic Framework for Analyzing Group Decision Making Problems, WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT, Vol: 28, Pages: 1839-1856, ISSN: 0920-4741
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- Citations: 38
Rosenberg DE, Madani K, 2014, Water Resources Systems Analysis: A Bright Past and a Challenging but Promising Future, JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol: 140, Pages: 407-409, ISSN: 0733-9496
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- Citations: 22
Madani K, Guegan M, Uvo CB, 2014, Climate change impacts on high-elevation hydroelectricity in California, JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGY, Vol: 510, Pages: 153-163, ISSN: 0022-1694
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- Citations: 41
Asgari S, Afshar A, Madani K, 2014, Cooperative Game Theoretic Framework for Joint Resource Management in Construction, JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol: 140, ISSN: 0733-9364
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- Citations: 44
Hjorth P, Madani K, 2014, Sustainability Monitoring and Assessment: New Challenges Require New Thinking, JOURNAL OF WATER RESOURCES PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT, Vol: 140, Pages: 133-135, ISSN: 0733-9496
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- Citations: 20
Read L, Madani K, Inanloo B, 2014, Optimality versus stability in water resource allocation, JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, Vol: 133, Pages: 343-354, ISSN: 0301-4797
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- Citations: 76
Hadian S, Madani K, Gonzalez J, et al., 2014, Sustainable Energy Planning with Respect to Resource Use Efficiency: Insights for the United States, Pages: 2066-2077
Increasing population, rising energy demand, global warming, and energy insecurity are recognized as the main motives for the rush to expand renewable energy sources in the United States. Nevertheless, the unintended impacts on major natural resource system components such as land and water make some of the renewable energies undesirable when sustainability of energy sources is considered. This study uses a multicriteria decision-making approach for evaluating the overall resource use efficiency of energy sources with respect to four criteria: carbon footprint, water footprint, land footprint, and cost. Given that the importance of these criteria can vary based on the availability of natural and economic resources at the regional level, weights of these criteria must be adjusted accordingly. Evaluation of the resource use efficiency of different energy sources with respect to regional resource availability limitations across the United States indicates that the desirability of energy sources is highly sensitive to regional conditions. The study's findings demonstrate that not all renewable energies are necessarily sustainable when regional resource availabilities are considered. Thus, consideration of resource availabilities at regional scale is essential for sustainable energy planning and management.
Hadian S, Madani K, 2014, New Finance-Based Portfolio Analysis Framework for Sustainable Energy Planning, Pages: 2043-2053
Traditionally, energy resource planning sought to minimize the cost of energy supply portfolios. With increasing greenhouse gas emissions, emissions reduction has also received attention in energy planning. Nevertheless, the unintended consequences of energy production processes, especially the impacts on water resources and land use are still largely ignored. In addition, energy planning hardly considers the true value of ecosystem resources and services exhausted for energy production. This paper proposes a new framework based on a finance theory, modern portfolio yheory (MPT), for analyzing the overall resource use efficiency of different energy mixes for different risk of return levels. The suggested finance-based resource use efficiency evaluation method can help maximize energy portfolio expected efficiency (overall efficiency with respect to cost, carbon footprint, water footprint, and land footprint) for a given amount of portfolio risk, or equivalently minimize risk for a given level of expected efficiency, by revising the energy mix. Evaluation of current and projected global energy portfolios based on this method suggests that the overall resource use efficiency of global portfolios can be increased by 100% with the same risk level by careful revision of the proportions of the energy supply from different sources in the overall global energy portfolios.
Gohari A, Madani K, Mirchi A, et al., 2014, System-Dynamics Approach to Evaluate Climate Change Adaptation Strategies for Iran's Zayandeh-Rud Water System, Pages: 1598-1607
This study aims to evaluate climate change adaptation strategies for the Zayandeh-Rud water system located in central Iran. A probabilistic multimodel ensemble scenario is used to characterize uncertainties in climate change projections for the study period (2015-2044). The Zayandeh-Rud watershed management and sustainability model (ZRW-MSM) is run under an ensemble scenario with different uncertainty levels to evaluate the effects of climate change on the Zayandeh-Rud water system and to identify effective adaptation strategies to minimize these effects. ZRW-MSM is a system dynamics model that captures the interrelations between the basin's hydrologic, socioeconomic, and agricultural sub-systems. This model can provide insights about the behavior trends of the basin's sub-systems under climate change impacts. If current water management policies hold into the future, Gav-Khouni Marsh, an important ecosystem, will severely degrade because of the lack of environmental flows, which will likely aggravate with climate change. Results indicate that supply-oriented strategies (water transfer) alone are not effective in mitigating climate change impacts on different use sectors. Nevertheless, when combined with effective water demand management, these measures can alleviate climate change-related anthropogenic water stress in the basin.
Pierce T, Madani K, 2014, Online Gaming for Understanding Agents' Behavior in Water-Sharing Problems, Pages: 1867-1875
While modeling can help with our understanding of complex coupled human-natural systems, past research has not been able to realistically simulate these systems because of two major limitations: (1) lack of computational capacity and proper mathematical models for solving distributed systems with self-optimizing agents and (2) lack of enough information about users' characteristics in common pool resource systems due to absence of reliable monitoring information. Recently, different studies have tried to address the first limitation by developing agent-based models, which can be appropriately handled with today's computational capacity. While these models are more realistic than the social planner's models, traditionally used in the field, they normally rely on different heuristics for characterizing users' behavior and incorporating heterogeneity. This work is a step forward in addressing the second limitation, suggesting an efficient method for collecting information on diverse behavioral characteristics of real agents for incorporation in distributed agent-based models. Gaming in interactive virtual environments is suggested as a reliable method for understanding different variables that promote sustainable resource use through observation of decision making and behavior of the resource system beneficiaries under various institutional frameworks and policies. In this work, a web-based groundwater sharing simulation game-Irrigania - is used as a tool to analyze the behavior of real agents under different common pool resource management institutions. Information is collected on participants' resource use, behavior, and mindset under different institutional settings through behavior observation and discussion with participants. Preliminary use of water resources gaming suggests communication, cooperation, information disclosure, trust, credibility, and social learning between beneficiaries as factors promoting a shift toward sustainable resource use. The different b
Davtalab R, Madani K, Massah A, et al., 2014, Evaluating the Effects of Climate Change on Water Reliability in Iran's Karkheh River Basin, Pages: 2127-2135
Karkheh River Basin (KRB) is the major water supply source for more than four million people in southwest Iran. Five riparian provinces of the KRB system have been pursuing aggressive development projects involving construction of multiple dams. These projects, together with increasing water withdrawals by Iran's neighboring country, Iraq, has resulted in the demise of the Hoor-Al-Azim marshland in the outlet of the basin. The frequent droughts in the region over the past decades have exacerbated the reliability of KRB water resources and the health of Hoor-Al-Azim marshland. This study evaluates the effects of climate change on KRB's ability to meet the increasing water demand in the region. Given the uncertainty in climate change projections, different climate change scenarios are selected through a clustering method, which tries to identify the scenarios with dissimilar characteristics. This helps evaluating the system under a range of climate change scenarios while minimizing redundancy in simulation model runs. Different systems performance indicators are used to examine the status of the KRB system under future climatic and water demand projections. Finally, different adaptation measures are identified and tested to minimize the undesirable effects of future changes on the system.
Msowoya K, Davtalab R, Madani K, 2014, Climate Change Impacts on Rainfed Corn Production in Malawi's Lilongwe District, Pages: 1580-1587
Agriculture is the mainstay of the economy in Malawi and accounts for 40% of gross domestic product (GDP) and 90% of export revenues. Corn is the major cereal crop grown as a staple food under rainfed conditions, covers more than 92% of the total agricultural area, and contributes 54% of caloric intake. Corn production is the principle occupation and major source of income for more than 80% of the total population in Malawi. Issues of hunger and food insecurity for the entire nation are associated with scarcity and low corn production. This study evaluates the impacts of climate change in mid-century on rainfed corn production in the Lilongwe District of Malawi. First, outputs of 15 GCMs under different emission scenarios are statistically downscaled. Probability assessment of bounded ranges with known distributions is used to account for the uncertainties of GCMs. AquaCrop is employed to assess potential rainfed corn production with and without climate change. Results show that by mid-century corn production in the Lilongwe District can decrease by as much as 14% due to temperature increase and precipitation decrease by up to 2.20°C and 26%, respectively.
Madani K, Rouhani OM, Mirchi A, et al., 2014, A negotiation support system for resolving an international trans-boundary natural resource conflict, ENVIRONMENTAL MODELLING & SOFTWARE, Vol: 51, Pages: 240-249, ISSN: 1364-8152
Madani K, Zarezadeh M, 2014, The Significance of Game Structure Evolution for Deriving Game-theoretic Policy Insights, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 2715-2720, ISSN: 1062-922X
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- Citations: 3
Madani K, Hooshyar M, Khatami S, et al., 2014, Nash-Reinforcement Learning (N-RL) for Developing Coordination Strategies in Non-Transferable Utility Games, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 2705-2710, ISSN: 1062-922X
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- Citations: 6
Zekri S, Karimi A, Madani K, 2014, The Value of Cooperation in Coastal Aquifer Management: Lessons for Oman, IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 2711-2714, ISSN: 1062-922X
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- Citations: 3
Zarezadeh M, Madani K, Morid S, 2013, Resolving conflicts over trans-boundary rivers using bankruptcy methods
<jats:p>Abstract. A bankruptcy approach is proposed for resolving trans-boundary rivers conflicts in which the total water demand or claim of the riparian parties is more than the available water. Bankruptcy solution methods can allocate the available water to the conflicting parties with respect to their claims. Four bankruptcy rules are used here to allocate the available water to the riparian parties. Given the non-uniform spatial and temporal distribution of water across river basins, bankruptcy optimization models are proposed to allocate water based on these rules with respect to time sensitivity of water deliveries during the planning horizon. Once allocation solutions are developed, their acceptability and stability must be evaluated. Thus, a new stability index method is developed for evaluating the acceptability of bankruptcy solutions. To show how the bankruptcy framework can be helpful in practice, the suggested methods are applied to a real-world tarns-boundary river system with eight riparians under various hydrologic regimes. Stability analysis based on the proposed stability index method suggests that the acceptability of allocation rules is sensitive to hydrologic conditions and demand values. This finding has an important policy implication suggesting that fixed allocation rules and trans-boundary treaties may not be reliable for securing cooperation over trans-boundary water resources as they are vulnerable to changing socio-economic and climatic conditions as well as hydrologic non-stationarity. </jats:p>
Hadian S, Madani K, 2013, The Water Demand of Energy: Implications for Sustainable Energy Policy Development, SUSTAINABILITY, Vol: 5, Pages: 4674-4687
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- Citations: 42
Madani K, Dinar A, 2013, Exogenous regulatory institutions for sustainable common pool resource management: Application to groundwater, Water Resources and Economics, Vol: 2-3, Pages: 57-76, ISSN: 2212-4284
This paper focuses on introducing and comparing various types of external regulatory institutions for management of common pool resources (CPRs), namely the quota-based management, resource status-based management, tax-based management, and bankruptcy management institutions. The performance of these regulatory institutions in a heterogeneous set of physical conditions is demonstrated using a stylized numerical groundwater exploitation example. Results suggest that the benefits to different types of users as well as the sustainability of the CPR vary by the regulator's choice of management institution. More specifically, quota-based management and CPR status-based management institutions can lead to increased benefits to CPR beneficiaries, prolong the CPR's life, and prevent "tragedy of the commons." In contrast, tax-based management institutions may fail to secure sustainable use of the CPRs. Bankruptcy-based management institutions may also be used toward sustainable use of the CPRs and to increase the benefits to the users; however, their overall effectiveness is not as desirable as the quota-based and resource status-based management institutions, especially when enforcing social justice is an issue of concern for the regulator. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.
Blasing TJ, Sullivan A, Madani K, 2013, Response of California Summer Hydroelectricity Generation to Spring Temperature, British Journal of Environment and Climate Change, Vol: 3, Pages: 316-332
Jamali S, Abrishamchi A, Madani K, 2013, Climate Change and Hydropower Planning in the Middle East: Implications for Iran's Karkheh Hydropower Systems, JOURNAL OF ENERGY ENGINEERING, Vol: 139, Pages: 153-160, ISSN: 0733-9402
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- Citations: 35
Madani K, 2013, Modeling international climate change negotiations more responsibly: Can highly simplified game theory models provide reliable policy insights?, ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS, Vol: 90, Pages: 68-76, ISSN: 0921-8009
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- Citations: 59
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