Water desalination supply chain modelling and optimization

The desalination industry has been growing progressively in the last few decades. A large number of new plants are contracted every year. Strategic decisions related to plant locations and capacity, the selection of the desalination technology, and many other technical decisions related to the plant design and operation are very critical to these strategic investments. Viewing the desalination industry network as a supply chain provides a holistic view allowing decision makers to perform optimization of water desalination operations end to end. The proposed methodology provides a set of modular simulation components to allow the creation of complex models to optimize the entire water desalination supply chain quickly and easily. The optimization is based on mathematical programming (MP) models that can be solved by external MP solvers.