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OPTIMIZING BMP PLACEMENT AT WATERSHED-SCALE USING SUSTAIN
Citation:
SHOEMAKER, L., F. LAI, J. X. ZHEN, K. ALVI, J. RIVERSON, AND T. RAFI. OPTIMIZING BMP PLACEMENT AT WATERSHED-SCALE USING SUSTAIN. In Proceedings, EWRI 2008 WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL & WATER RESOURCES CONGRESS, HONOLULU, HI, May 13 - 16, 2008. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, VA, ., (2008).
Impact/Purpose:
to inform the public
Description:
Watershed and stormwater managers need modeling tools to evaluate alternative plans for environmental quality restoration and protection needs in urban and developing areas. A watershed-scale decision-support system, based on cost optimization, provides an essential tool to support government and local watershed planning agencies as they coordinate watershed-scale investments to achieve the needed improvements in water quality. Efforts have been under way by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 2003 for the development of a decision-support system for placement of Best Management Plans (BMPs) at strategic locations in urban watersheds. The system is called the System for Urban Stormwater Treatment and Analysis INtegration (SUSTAIN). This tool is designed to be used by experienced watershed and stormwater practitioners to develop, evaluate, and select optimal BMP options for various watershed scales based on cost and effectiveness. One dominant technical requirement for SUSTAIN is the ability to evaluate management practices at multiple scales, ranging from local to watershed applications. The site or local scale evaluation involves simulations of individual BMPs and analyses of the impact of various combinations of practices and treatment trains on local water quantity and quality. On a larger scale watershed, there may be hundreds or thousands of individual management practices that are implemented to achieve a desired cumulative benefit. The required simulations and cost comparisons of these distributed BMP options place significant challenges on the computational accuracy and simulation time for system modeling. SUSTAIN uses a “lumped” approach to represent distributed BMPs to minimize computational effort, especially when distributed BMPs are involved in the optimization process as decision variables. SUSTAIN also incorporates an innovative two tier approach that allows for cost-effectiveness evaluation of both individual and multiple nested watersheds to address the needs of regional and local scale applications. This paper will describe the procedures for a "lumped” BMP evaluation and tiered optimization/analysis approaches for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of BMPs on a regional scale. Selected examples will be provided to demonstrate the implications of model simulation time and complexity on the solution of optimization questions.
URLs/Downloads:
OPTIMIZING BMP PLACEMENT AT WATERSHED-SCALE USING SUSTAIN
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