Application of information theory to design and evaluate discharge
monitoring network: A case study on Surma River
Abstract
In developing countries like Bangladesh, river discharge monitoring
networks are designed unseemly, operated poorly, and often fail to reach
their purposes resulting in the unavailability of sufficient data to
describe the behavior of such systems. In these cases, water-related
decisions may create problems for the environment, the regional economy,
and society. This paper has investigated the application of Shannon’s
Information Theory to design and evaluate an efficient discharge
monitoring network for the Surma River. A 1-D model has been formulated
to extract all discharge data at different points of Surma River using
MIKE 11. The appropriate monitoring station locations were determined by
optimizing two conflicting objective functions (joint entropy and total
correlation) using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II and
Greedy algorithm. The study demonstrates that an informative yet less
redundant monitoring network configuration can be found through the
greedy algorithm.