Integrated framework for assessing urban water supply security of systems with non-traditional sources under climate change

Assessing water supply security for urban water supply system (UWSS) planning is now more challenging with the inclusion of non-traditional sources, which increases simulation complexity, and the need to account for climate change impacts, which increases uncertainty. This paper addresses this by developing an integrated framework for assessing the security of UWSSs with non-traditional sources under climate change. The framework is applied to a case study based on the southern Adelaide UWSS. The case study objectives include minimizing cost and maximizing supply security, with the latter assessed using reliability, maximum failure duration, maximum vulnerability, and robustness. Robustness represents the performance of the UWSS across plausible future scenarios, comprising of realizations of climate change and consumer demand. Trade-offs exist between cost and supply security for solutions that use desalination and harvested stormwater to augment water supply; however, use of rainwater tanks is undesirable, as they are an expensive source.