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Multi-scale Systems Analysis for Optimization of Water Supply Infrastructure
Citation:
Yang, J., C. Neil, N. Chang, Y. Jun, B. Bierwagen, AND T. Speth. Multi-scale Systems Analysis for Optimization of Water Supply Infrastructure. Presented at 255th ACS meeting, New Orleans, LA, March 18 - 22, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Present to the technical community the EPA research on sustainable urban water infrastructure, and propose a tiered approach for optimization in the infrastructure planning and system design.
Description:
Systems analysis in multi-objective optimization offers quantitative comparisons of benefit-cost trade-offs against a set of, often competing, engineering and management objectives. Such technical approaches are common in chemical engineering and in hazardous waste engineering, such as CERCLA site remediation. Faced with increasing needs to satisfy multiple objectives, water system engineering has embraced this trend of systems analysis. Examples can be found in numerous publications after the 2000s, mostly focused on water process unit operations. Some have extended these optimization techniques into GA-based optimization of water infrastructure planning scenarios in master planning. One commonality in systems modeling is the thorough integrated modeling that requires detailed unit engineering analysis and objective-based comparison among a set of competing and feasible business and management scenarios. In this presentation, we will explore different types of systems modeling for water system optimization, highlighting the feasibility and differences in quantitative analysis of competing planning and operational scenarios. Under an engineering hierarchy, water infrastructure planning scenarios are adequately defined after the projections of future land use and population-employment; the latter is based on either classic master planning or by computer simulations using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios (ICLUS) models or the mechanistic Cellular Automata – Markov techniques. One application of the systems analysis is the optimization of the water supply expansion in Manatee County, Florida, for which the life-cycle energy consumption and system cost are compared and optimized for better water supply resiliency. Furthermore, at the operational level, detailed unit process engineering is simulated by integrated modeling of a water treatment system in Cincinnati, Ohio. This application example illustrates how system-wide optimization using integrated simulation of unit operations to achieve the efficacy of water disinfection, control the disinfection by-product (DBP) formation in disinfection, and reduce the system operational cost.