Planning and Scheduling Integration for Land Use Under Food-Energy-Water Nexus Considerations: A Case Study in Texas Edwards Region

Land use planning and scheduling under Food-Energy-Water Nexus (FEW-N) considerations is a complicated decision-making problem with resource competitions and conflicting objectives ^[1]. Systematic thinking based on FEW-N is necessary for modeling and optimization of land use systems ^[2]. However, challenges arise in making decisions while encountering conflicting objectives, multi-scale and multi-period problems, and multiple stakeholders ^[3]. To address these challenges, we developed a generic optimization-based land allocation approach, which provides i) a composite FEW-N metric to help solve the multi-objective optimization problem and carry out assessments ^{[4, 5]}, and ii) a two-stage decomposition strategy to solve the multi-scale and multi-period planning and scheduling problem. The developed strategy was applied in an agricultural land use case study within the Texas Edwards Region. Computational results indicate that the approach can provide a comprehensive FEW-N metric to select strategies for optimal land allocation, limit stresses in the FEW-N, and achieve trade-off solutions for the multi-scale and multi-period FEW land use systems.

Reference:

[1] Tian, Hanqin, et al. "Optimizing resource use efficiencies in the food–energy–water nexus for sustainable agriculture: from conceptual model to decision support system." Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 33 (2018): 104-113.

[2] Daher, Bassel, et al. "Developing socio-techno-economic-political (STEP) solutions for addressing resource nexus hotspots." Sustainability 10.2 (2018): 512.

[3] Garcia, Daniel J., and Fengqi You. "The water-energy-food nexus and process systems engineering: a new focus." Computers & Chemical Engineering 91 (2016): 49-67.

[4] Avraamidou, Styliani, et al. "Towards a Quantitative Food-Energy-Water Nexus Metric to Facilitate Decision Making in Process Systems: A Case Study on a Dairy Production Plant." Computer Aided Chemical Engineering. Vol. 43. Elsevier, 2018. 391-396.

[5] Nie, Yaling, et al. "A Food-Energy-Water Nexus approach for land use optimization." Science of The Total Environment 659 (2019): 7-19.