A negotiation based approach to Waste Load Allocation problems

A meta-heuristic based negotiation algorithm is proposed to resolve conflict over the Waste Load Allocation (WLA) problem in rivers. In the proposed approach, the waste dischargers are allowed to negotiate with each other using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and decide how much they plan to discharge while strictly meeting the environmental standards at the checkpoints. The proposed algorithm is applied to solve two mathematical benchmark problems. Moreover, the approach developed is used to study an illustrative WLA problem.