A Novel Method in Surface Water Quality Assessment Based on Improved Variable Fuzzy Set Pair Analysis

In the case of surface water pollution, it is important and necessary to accurately assess the level of contaminated water and ensure the safety of drinking water for people in disaster areas during floods. However, for the assessment of the strict requirements of drinking water, traditional assessment methods still have some limitations, such as low precision and rationality. In order to overcome these limitations, in the light of the theory of set pair analysis and variable fuzzy set, we propose an improved variable fuzzy set pair analysis method (IVFSPA), which combines the analysis framework of variable fuzzy set and set pair analysis, and has made some improvements to the fusion architecture. Firstly, we present a novel game theory comprehensive weighting method, in which the objective entropy method and the subjective analytic hierarchy process(AHP) method employed to obtain the reasonable weight. Then, based on the Nemerow index method, we improve the arithmetic form of “Pi” (Equation P) to replace the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Furthermore, we design a double judgment mode of combining the principle of maximum membership degree with the positive and negative relationship between the standard value and the measured value, which can accurately judge the evaluation level of surface water quality. Finally, to validate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments was conducted at the representative river collection sections of Nanking, China, employing water quality data of 14 sampling sections in their rivers in Nanking during the 2017 flood. In terms of performance metcrics of precision and rationality, based on the values of “TP”, “NH3-N”, “Pb”, “AS” and “KMnO4” of “Ch-lh section/Chuhe gate” are 0.415, 3.77, 0.07, 0.23 and 7.12, respectively, the level of Ch-lh section/Chuhe gate is that the IVFSPA is Class V and the rest are class IV. Results of experiments show that our IVFSPA method can achieve a good performance, compared with other traditional methods.