Solve the Water Shortage in a Tourism-Dependent Island: A Proactive Operation Strategy of Pumping Allocation for a BWRO Plant

Abstract

In many islands, especially those small island developing states (SIDS), are extremely depend on tourism for supporting their economy; however, the development of tourism always accompanies the consumption of natural resources, in which fresh water is particularly essential. An expansion of tourism leads to increased demand for water; consequently, a lack of fresh water can restrict the sustainable development of those islands. With the progress of technique, applying reverse osmosis membrane has become a tendency when treating raw water. The conventional pumping strategies always depend on engineers’ judgments when facing multi-source feed water desalination plant; therefore they could not sure whether their operation could conform to the optimality of water resources management. This research aims at the pumping planning of a brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) plant, and proposed a nonlinear mathematical programming model, to design the optimal pumping allocation of a BWRO plant with proactive framework. The results shown that the proposed model of the paper not only could provide available information in BWRO feed water management, but could allow engineers gain new insight through the management sciences.