A complex water allocation decision support system for Beijing

Water is critical, but often overlooked element in sustainable development. The paradigm encapsulated in the "Beijing water allocation decision support system" (BjWDSS) explicitly challenges conventional, fractional water development and management systems and places emphasis on integrated approach with more coordinated decision making across sectors and scales. Recognizing that exclusively top-down, supply-led, technically-based and sectoral approaches to water management are imposing unsustainably high economic, social and ecological costs on human and on the natural environment. BjWDSS utilize optimization techniques to facilitate optimal decision making in the planning and management of especially large scale water resources systems. A water system involves several stakeholders with different, often conflicting objectives, and thus the proper framework for the statement of the decisional problem under consideration should be that of multi-objective decision analysis. Therefore, BjWDSS couples a simulation model based on the RiverMod-Library with numerical search methods IPOPT/HQP for optimizing relevant decision variables. The concept is tested and now in application on the large scale Beijing water supply system, where all challenges of water resources management come together. The results of the DSS show that the concept significantly improves the water system's performance in terms of sustainability, efficiency and survivability.