Towards a deterministic sustainable cost-effective water supply chain

Abstract

Managing water resources is one of the most challenging problems in today’s world. There is an immense change in climate change, population growth, and environment, thereby increasing pressures on water resources. Due to future uncertainty and availability of resources, many priorities should be taken into account in the drinking-water system such as environmental impacts, distribution costs and fixed costs. This paper proposes a deterministic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model for planning and designing a water supply chain network in order to optimize multi-objective problems. The model considers costs which include fixed and variable costs, in addition, it considers sustainability in terms of environmental viewpoint. The applicability of the model is appraised through a case study whose data gathered from related articles and water and waste company reports in Iran, which consists of five candidate reservoir nodes and four dam nodes besides eleven candidate locations for treatment plants. Thereafter, the proposed model has been coded in GAMS® optimization software. The model could be an expedient tool in order to manage urban water supply chains in a cost-effective and sustainable manner to satisfy water demand at every time period.