Abstract:
With 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. Goal programming is a technique which
uses optimization methods to provide a means to solve a problem by striving towards
multiple objectives simultaneously. This research seeks to apply an optimization
framework to the integrated water supply planning process. The research has developed
a methodology to that can successfully generate a feasible set of alternative solutions
while balancing all three goals of the TBL.
Performance measures for each of the three goals (economic, environmental, and
social) are the core building blocks to enable analysis of total water management plans.
Generally, economic goals are well understood and defined. Over the past decade,
environmental goals have been developing enhanced understanding and usage. Special
attention will be paid to the third pillar of sustainability – social, which is generally
agreed that measures are lacking. A targeted survey of industry experts indicated that the
social sustainability metrics showing the most promise for use are related to affordability,
reliability, and resilience.
Furthermore, the research showed that the goal programming methodology could
use existing data (utility master plans) and tools (Excel) to execute the model and develop
tradeoffs between the various aspects of the TBL. In the demonstration with real world
utility data, examples are shown detailing the relative costs for enhanced environmental
and social goal achievement. The methodology has the potential to provide increased
visibility to cost, societal and environmental issues for to the decision makers in order to
enhance the decision analysis of water supply strategies by incorporating the
environmental and social aspects of sustainability into the decision process.
