A Comparative Study of Fuzzy Logic and WQI for Groundwater Quality Assessment

Nowadays, human health, as well as environment, are at risk due to uncontrolled usage on natural resources. Groundwater is one of the crucial natural resource, excessively used and contaminated by human beings. It is, majorly contaminated by anthropogenic activities. Such contaminated water, when used for drinking purpose, may cause serious effects on human health. Therefore, it is necessary to precisely estimate the quality of groundwater. Conventionally, the WQI, a weighted arithmetic index method, is commonly used to estimate groundwater quality by researchers. As time rolled on, some drawbacks, such as uncertainty of data, of WQI came into light. So researchers tried to find a new approach to mitigate the problems associated with WQI. In this direction, fuzzy logic has been used and proven by researchers to eliminate the ambiguity involved in qualitative and quantitative researches. The paper aims to do a comparative study between fuzzy logic and WQI to estimate groundwater quality. The objective is to represent complex groundwater data into clear and simple data that can be easily interpreted by the general public and policymakers.