Policy Screening Models for Water Supply Operation

It is possible to characterize the real time, short term operation of a metropolitan water supply system - including the surface and groundwater sources, treatment and pumping facilities, and the distribution network - as a multiple objective mathematical program. Once this optimization model is calibrated to represent the water supply system adequately, it may be used to analyze long term operation or as part of a simulation model of the system to analyze different strategies to survive a drought successfully. A case study using this approach to study real time operation of a metropolitan water supply system under drought conditions is described.