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Optimal Expansion of a Drinking Water Infrastructure System with Respect to Carbon Footprint, Cost Effectiveness and Water Demand
Citation:
Chang, N., Q. Cheng, AND Y. J. YANG. Optimal Expansion of a Drinking Water Infrastructure System with Respect to Carbon Footprint, Cost Effectiveness and Water Demand . JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, 110:194-206, (2012).
Impact/Purpose:
To inform the public.
Description:
Urban water infrastructure requires careful long-term expansion planning to reduce the risk from climate change during both the periods of economic boom and recession. As part of the adaptation management strategies, capacity expansion in concert with other management alternatives responding to the population dynamics, ecological conservation, and water management policies should be systematically examined to balance the water supply and demand temporally and spatially with different scales. To mitigate the climate change impact, this practical implementation oftentimes requires carrying out a multi-objective decision analysis by introducing economic efficiencies and carbon-footprint matrices at the same time. The demonstration of the optimal expansion strategies for a typical water infrastructure system in South Florida entails the essence of the new philosophy. Within our case study, the multi-objective modeling framework uniquely features an integrated evaluation of transboundary surface and groundwater resources, and quantitatively assesses the interdependencies among drinking water supply, wastewater reuse, and irrigation water permit transfer as the management options expand throughout varying dimensions. With the aid of a multi-stage planning methodology over the partitioned time horizon, such a systems analysis has resulted in a full-scale screening and sequencing of multiple competing objectives across a suite of management strategies. These strategies that prioritize 20 options cast a possible thrust of the expansion schedule over the next twenty years for the improvement of co-benefits in terms of water infrastructure resilience and low life-cycle cost. The proposed method is transformative to other applications of similar water infrastructure systems elsewhere in the world.
