(644b) Sustainable Design Of Macroscopic WATER Networks

Water is one of the most important resources for human development; it is used to meet several needs in the daily life such sanitary, agricultural and industrial demands, as well as to satisfy daily human consumption demands. Due to population growth, overexploitation of natural water reserves, as well as climate change which implies change in the precipitation patterns in the world, the ability to meet all these demands is jeopardized. Thus, it is important to seek alternative water sources which help to reduce water consumption and increase the natural water reserves. Several strategies have been proposed rewarding alternative water sources such as reuse of treated water, desalination of sea water and rainwater harvesting. When considering alternative water sources, so far there are no formal optimization models that address the problem efficiently, considering properly a macroscopic system and the increasing demands and population growth in a definite time span. In this project, a mathematical programming model for the efficient and sustainable use of water is proposed. The model considers water harvesting and water reclamation as alternative water sources. The objective is to meet the demands in a macroscopic system during a time span of 10 years by planning the water storage and distribution schedule while satisfying sustainability criteria for the level of natural water resources. The model is posed as a mixed integer nonlinear model in which the objective is to maximize the total revenue from the sales of water minus the total cost of implementation of the aforementioned strategies. The proposed model was coded in the optimization platform GAMS^® and applied to a case study for the city of Morelia, Michoacán in Mexico. Results show the optimal schedule for water storage and distribution to the different users of the system (public, agricultural and industrial users). It was shown how the implementation of alternative water sources to meet the demands in a macroscopic system impacts positively the sustainability of the natural water bodies and is still economically attractive.