Incorporating Property-Based Water Networks and Surrounding Watersheds in Site Selection of Industrial Facilities

This paper presents a new mathematical programming approach for including water usage and discharge in the selection of installation sites for industrial facilities. Water integration within the industrial facility as well as interaction of the discharged wastewater with the environment and the surrounding watershed are considered simultaneously through a material flow analysis model. The model tracks the properties that affect the process sinks and the environment (e.g., pH, toxicity, density, color, chemical oxygen demand, etc.) as well as compositions of targeted components. The model considers all the inlets and outlets that affect the watershed as well as the interactions between the pollutants and the environment. The objective function is aimed at minimizing the total annualized cost, which includes the installation cost of the new facility, the transportation of raw materials, products, and utilities, the land cost, the wastewater treatment costs (including the piping cost), and the fresh sources cost. The proposed methodology is applied to two case studies in Egypt and Mexico.