Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
8-1-2014
Abstract
Predicted climatic, demographic and socio-economic developments cause major adaptions of urban water infrastructures. The central water supply and wastewater systems in Europe do not meet the increased requirements of resource efficiency and sustainability anymore. Especially in rural areas predicted demographic change and the particular differentiated settlement structure affect the functionality of present water infrastructures. These new challenges require extensive and flexible adaptions or even a long-term and dynamic system change of urban infrastructures. These long-term transformations of infrastructure systems require the design of innovative strategies. In the project presented, environmental engineers together with city planners, mathematicians and computer scientists develop an innovative software-supported optimization and decision support system for the implementation of long-term transformations of existing infrastructures of water supply, wastewater and energy. Special attention is paid to the increasing uncertainty of future factors. Boundary conditions of transformation processes in rural areas as well as the connected political, economic and legal requirements are implied. The planning and decision scope of a cross-sectoral system transformation is focused on the local level under consideration of predicted future regional requirements and the engineering consideration of the supply and disposal system. The optimal solution for adaptation and transformation of systems regarding different objective functions will calculated for selected pilot studies and scenarios. The developed demonstrator of the decision model will be a prototype software solution for interactive process modeling and decision supporting. It will be tested and evaluated in a rural case study region in the Southwest of Germany. The selected municipalities have a wide range of settlement structures and face different challenges for the future design of urban supply and disposal systems.
Comments
Session R56, Water Distribution Networks: Infrastructure Health