Exploring the effects of physical and social networks on urban water system’s supply-demand dynamics through a hybrid agent-based modeling framework

Abstract

The urban water system involves complex interactions between physical and social factors, such as physical infrastructures and information communications. Among these, the water supply network (WSN) and water consumers network (WCN) are critical determinants of water supply and demand, which are featured with prominent structural heterogeneity and interrelationships. The structures of WSN and WCN have been traditionally modeled in isolation under the assumption of structural homogeneity. This work proposes a new agent-based modeling (ABM) framework with a local-world fitness network to explore the effects of structural heterogeneity and WSN-WCN interrelationship on water supply–demand dynamics. A case study in Lhasa reveals that, the traditionally assumed fully-connected water supply system and structurally homogeneous water user network may result in simultaneous overestimation of water demand and underestimation of inter-region variances in water demand and groundwater table. Our analysis provides new insights into the disentanglement of the complex interdependencies of WSN and WCN and their associated structural heterogeneities, which could be extended to the modeling of other complex and interrelated networks.