Abstract:The optimal allocation of agricultural water resources is an effective way to improve the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources. The formulation of agricultural water resources allocation scheme needs to consider multiple conflicting objectives, which can be solved by building a multiobjective optimal allocation model. When solving such multiobjective models, the multiobjective model is often transformed as a single objective model with the goal of maximizing target achievement. However, such method can hardly reflect other aspects that the decision-makers are concerned about, such as the synergy degree of different goals and the impact of the scheme on the sustainable development ability. Moreover, setting only one index as the objective function cannot fully reflect the comprehensive impact of multidimensional optimization needs on the optimization scheme. Therefore, a composite multiobjective method was proposed to optimally allocate agricultural water resources based on the three indicators, including coordination degree of multiple objectives, sustainable development index, and target realization degree. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, composite multiobjective method was applied to a real-world case in the middle reaches of Heihe River in Gansu Province for optimally allocating agricultural water resources among 17 irrigation districts. A multiobjective optimization model with objective functions of economic, social and ecological benefits was developed, and different solving methods were employed to solve the model. The optimization results showed that the agricultural water resources utilization coefficient can be increased by 5.42%~7.57% by using the composite multiobjective method. The results of single objective model were too extreme to be applied to practical water resources allocation comparing with results of multiobjective model. Compared with the multiobjective models which only used one index as the transformation objective function, the optimization scheme obtained by the composite multiobjective method can well reflect the multiple requirements of decision-makers for regional agricultural development and agricultural water resources allocation.