Model based sustainable management of regional water supply systems

Sustainable management of water resources and a safe supply of drinking water will play a key role for the development of the human prosperity in the following decades. This paper presents an optimal control approach for the management of the total water resources in a fast developing region under a critical water shortage. A model of the water allocation system is developed which considers both surface and groundwater resources and the distribution network. The spatially distributed groundwater model is considered as a reduced model of the complex 3D Finite Element model. Hence the optimization problem, which is formulated as large scale structured non-linear programming problem, can be solved in an appropriate computation time. The performance of the proposed concept is demonstrated by close to reality optimization scenarios.