This paper reviews the published literature on potential membrane fouling components, available cleaning agents and possible interactions between cleaning agents and fouling components. It also lists the cleaning models available in the literature, and evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of these models. Based on this outcome, a new cleaning model is proposed to capture cleaning dynamics for 10 different cleaning agents, varying from acidic, alkali and oxidizing to sequestering agents and detergents that were used to clean dead-end ultra filtration membranes fouled by surface water. The model is effectively fitted to the experimental data of the different cleanings. Two criteria are subsequently introduced to quantify the overall cleaning effect of a cleaning agent in terms of cleaning rate and cleaning effectiveness. For membranes fouled by surface water with high organic content it was found that caustic-and oxidizing cleaning agents give the best overall cleaning results. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.