Balancing the Triple Bottom Line in Water Supply Planning for Utilities

To achieve the triple bottom line (TBL) of sustainability, total water management efforts must analyze alternatives to address the potentially conflicting goals of economics (financial), environmental, and social issues. Traditionally, decisions were heavily influenced by economics. The alternative with the best cost-benefit ratio was generally considered to be superior. As the need to make sustainable decisions becomes increasingly important, a similar need surfaces for a methodology to balance sustainability objectives in a realistic manner. Goal programming is a technique that uses optimization methods to provide a means to solve a problem by striving towards multiple objectives simultaneously. This research applies an optimization framework to the integrated water supply planning process. The research demonstrates a methodology that can successfully generate a feasible set of alternative solutions while balancing all three goals of the TBL. Furthermore, the research showed that the goal programming me...