Abstract
One of the classical but very important problems on designing water quality monitoring systems is to examine what the system will give the management of water quality for the expenditure of sampling and analyzing efforts. In other words, the system should be balanced between the utility of acquired information and the efforts of its acquisition.
Coping with this principle which constitutes one of the fundamentals of the rational design of water quality monitoring, this paper proposes a quantitative method to balance the above two factors from the view point of cost/benefit analysis. In this method, the benefit of acquired data is measured as the reduction of economic loss of the water quality management program, and it is compared with the cost of data acquisition to find the most effective efforts of water quality monitoring. Pollutant load reduction programs of lake basins were used to apply the proposed method, and optimal numbers of sampling points were calculated in order to check the feasibility of the method.
