With the help of the management tool, water suppliers can make optimal use of their various raw water resources in extreme situations such as droughts, but also under normal conditions. Even in situations where individual resources are temporarily unavailable, the tool can support important decisions on resource use.
The management tool provides a means of optimizing the use of resources for drinking water production, even under unfavorable hydrological conditions. Not only does security of supply play an important role here, but also drinking water quality. In addition, production costs must be taken into account, which are particularly significant when using different production areas or resources.
The management tool was tested on the resources of the Landeswasserversorgung (LW) special-purpose association, but has a general approach that allows it to be transferred to the resources of other water suppliers.
The management tool is based on a neural network for real-time forecasting of groundwater levels. An optimization algorithm based on this takes into account security of supply, drinking water quality, and extraction costs. Using multi-criteria decision-making, the management tool searches for an optimal solution for resource utilization in terms of the above criteria, given the boundary conditions. Since the criteria of supply security, drinking water quality, and extraction costs are not easily comparable, these aspects are converted into a numerical space that can be used by the optimization algorithm for evaluation. In order to take into account the operational specifications of the water supplier, it is necessary to introduce additional constraints, which must be considered as “hard” conditions by the optimizer. These constraints include minimum and maximum withdrawal rates for individual resources or resource groups, as well as critical parameters such as minimum groundwater levels that must not be fallen below. The tool supports the supplier in both multi-week and seasonal forecasts (6 to 12 months).
The graphical user interface allows the results of the optimization to be analyzed in detail and exported as a PDF report.
