Residential Water Consumption Modeling in the Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT)

This paper details a method for residential water consumption modeling within the Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT), a computational modeling platform for evaluating environmental performance of urban communities under alternative growth scenarios. A bottom-up approach is introduced to generate end-use indoor and outdoor water profiles by applying GLM and Ridge regression methods to Residential End Uses of Water, Version 2 (REU II-2016) dataset and investigating the influence of demographic and climate factors, as well as utility rate structures on patterns of consumption. The data is collected from 2010 through 2013 by nine utilities that operate in North America on 771 and 838 single family units for indoor and outdoor water use respectively. Potential advances to surveying methods as well as the need for tools that allow simultaneous, isolated assessment of educational and technological conservation measures are explained.