An optimization procedure for the sustainable management of water resources

Abstract

The sustainable management of water resources requires the identification of procedures to optimize the use and management of resources that are able to deal adequately with the problems of an integrated water service. Taking cue from the classic problem of transport of operations research, this paper proposes a procedure to optimize the allocation of resources for water supply in an area. The transportation problem has been particularized to the case of water resources management considering water intake structures present in a territory as source nodes and utilities in the area as destination nodes. The variables to be determined are the quantity of water resources transferred from each source node to each destination node, in order to achieve a balance between the needs and availability, minimizing the costs of supply consequently necessary. The problem that is obtained, is a constrained non-linear type problem that can be used, for example, to solve local problems of supply, through the redefinition of the distribution system. An application of the model to the province of Croton in southern Italy is shown. The results obtained from the application of the model show the reliability of the methodology in applications similar to that of the case study.