Development of water supply system under uncertainty

Abstract

As urbanization is progressed, the network for distributing water in a basin become complex due to the spatial expansion and parameter uncertainties of water supply systems. When a long range water supply plan is determined, the total construction and operation cost has to be evaluated with the system components and parameter uncertainties as many as possible. In this paper, the robust optimization approach of Bertsimas and Sim is applied in a hypothetical system to find a solution which remains feasible under the possible parameter uncertainties having the correlation effect between the uncertain coefficients. The system components to supply, treatment, and transport water are included in the developed water supply system and construction and expansion of the system is allowed for a long-range period. In this approach, the tradeoff between system robustness and total cost of the system is evaluated in terms of the degree of conservatism which can be converted to the probability of constraint violation. As a result, the degree of conservatism increases, the total cost is increased due to the installation of large capacity of treatment and transportation systems. The applied robust optimization technique can be used to determine a long-range water supply plan with the consideration of system failure.