Analyzing urban water supply through an acceptability-index-based interval approach

Incorporation of uncertainties within an urban water supply management system has been a challenging topic for many years. In this study, an acceptability-index-based two-step interval programming (AITIP) model was developed for supporting urban water supply analysis under uncertainty. AITIP improved upon the traditional two-step interval programming (TIP) through incorporating the acceptability level of constraints violation into the optimization framework. A four-layer urban water supply system, including water sources, treatment facilities, reservoirs, and consuming zones, was used to demonstrate the applicability of proposed method. The results indicated that an AITIP model was valuable to help understand the effects of uncertainties related to cost, constraints and decision maker’s judgment in the water supply network, and capable of assisting urban water managers gain an in-depth insight into the tradeoffs between system cost and constraints-violation risk. Compared with TIP, the solutions from AITIP were of lower degree of uncertainty, making it more reliable to identify effective water supply patterns by adjusting decision variable values within their solution intervals. The study is useful in helping urban water managers to identify cost-effective management schemes in light of uncertainties in hydrology, environment, and decisions. The proposed optimization approach is expected to be applicable for a wide variety of water resources management problems.

► A new interval programming (AITIP) method based on acceptability index was developed.
► AITIP was applied to an urban water supply network adapted from a real-world case.
► This study can help understand the effects of uncertainties in managing water supplies.
► AITIP appears to be applicable to many other water resources management problems.