Optimal Management of Regional Water Supply Systems Using a Reduced Finite-Element Groundwater ModelOptimierte Bewirtschaftung von regionalen Wasserversorgungssystemen unter Nutzung eines reduzierten Finite-Elemente Grundwassermodells

The sustainable management of water resources and a reliable supply of safe drinking water will play a key role for the human prosperity in the following decades. This paper presents an optimal control approach for the management of water resources in a rapid developing region with critical water shortage. A model of the water allocation system is developed which considers both surface and groundwater resources and the distribution network. A reduced model of the complex spatially distributed 3D Finite Element groundwater model is applied. Hence the optimization problem, which is formulated as a large scale structured non-linear programming problem, can be solved with appropriate computation effort. The performance of the proposed concept is analyzed using realistic optimization scenarios.