Optimisation for Sustainable Water Resources Management

The overall aim of OPTIMA is to develop, implement, test, critically evaluate, and exploit an innovative, scientifically rigorous yet practical approach to water resources management, in close cooperation with local and regional stakeholders, intended to increase efficiencies and to reconcile conflicting demands based on the European Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC). The approach equally considers economic efficiency, environmental compatibility, and social equity as the pillars of sustainable development. The project realises both the importance if not dominance of the socio-political and economic aspects, but also the importance of a reliable, consistent, and shared information basis for the policy and decision making process. Empowerment through scientifically based but policy relevant information is a key concept (AG 21, Chapter 40).

The proposed methodology will extend classical optimisation and mathematical programming methodology in several respects, by:

• Developing the objectives, criteria and constraints in close cooperation with stakeholders and actors in an interactive approach, with emphasis to socio-economic structures and gender where feasible and scientifically meaningful;
• Using a full-featured dynamic and distributed simulation model and genetic programming as the core to generate feasible and non-dominated alternatives. Water technology alternatives including their cost structure, and up-to-date remote-sensing derived land use information are primary inputs;
• Extending the set of objectives, criteria and constraints through expert systems technology to include difficult to quantify environmental and social dimensions;
• Putting specific emphasis on local acceptance and implementation through the inclusion of stake-holders in an interactive, participatory decision making process carefully embedded in institutional structures, using a discrete multi-criteria reference point methodology. The formal approach provides a rational basis for policy and decision making, empowerment and legitimacy through information;
• Comparative evaluation and benchmarking across the set of local and regional case studies in 7 countries, namely Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, and Morocco around the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean.

Potential Impacts

Contributions to standards

While the project will use European and international standards, e.g., on drinking water quality, wherever applicable, it will not directly contribute to the definition or setting of standards other than as described above.

Contribution to policy developments

The proposed project is expected to have impacts in the Mediterranean region by:

• Directly contributing to better water management strategies in the seven case study countries and on the region as a whole through appropriate dissemination mechanisms;
• Providing a set of tools and an approach for the design of efficient, environmentally and socially compatible water management strategies, in line with the concepts of the EU Water Framework Directives, but adapted to the local setting of each of the case studies;
• Establishing networks of actors and stakeholders concerned with water management, both within each case study area as well as across the region, facilitating an exchange of experience and best practice in the region.

Within this framework, expected impacts will relate directly to EU policy regarding the management of water resources by providing powerful tools for resource management policy analysis that links the approaches described in the EU Water Framework Directive, and the Euro-Mediterranean partnership with national water policies in Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Tunisia, Malta and Morocco. The Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000 (WFD) establishes a framework for Community action in the field of water policy. This directive is primarily concerned with the quality of water resources and does not deal with the management of scarce water resources directly. However, the control regime for water quantity regulation that is introduced will be carefully assessed for its applicability in the study areas. In particular, the principles of full cost recovery and polluter pays that are established by this directive will be policy reference points for evaluating economic efficiency and technical feasibility in water management scenarios.

The measures that are a requirement under Article 11 describe controls for the abstraction of groundwater and also include measures to promote the efficient and sustainable use of water. The OPTIMA project focuses on water scarce countries will result in a set of best practice guidelines that will contribute to developing European know how in designing sustainable solutions. The Euro-Mediterranean Conference on water management held in Marseilles 25th and 26 of November 1996, the Declaration of the Euro-Mediterranean Ministerial Conference on local water management Turin, 18-19 October 1999, and the resulting Turin Action Plan are the cornerstone documents that describe European policy for water resources in the Mediterranean, and will form a strong basis for analytic work.

Innovative and efficient tools and an approach, forming a comprehensive integrated decision support system for the analysis and operational management of complex natural resources systems implementing concepts of applied systems analysis are the expected product: emphasis on practical implementation through the careful screening of alternatives, consideration of the institutional framework, and the direct involvement of stake holders in the decision making process are designed to maximize the impact of project results.

To that end, the project directly involves and addresses local and regional government as well as institutions involved in the water sector, including private industry. In addition, it involves elements of the civic society such as NGOs as the ultimate end users or end user representatives of water resources management policies for sustainable development as a balance to purely economic considerations market forces as major controlling element in development and any sustainable resource management strategy.

The efficient management of scarce water resources requires a balanced consideration of numerous aspects including environmental, techno-economic, and socio-political aspects. The complexity of the problem, the large number of possible measures and their combinations, nonlinearities and uncertainties make intuitive solutions impossible, so that formal methods of decision support based on optimisation techniques are necessary for the design of successful, efficient solutions.

The project is expected to contribute to these major elements of water resources management:

• Guaranteeing sufficient, regular and safe water supplies by optimising the demand-supply balance with emphasis not only on efficiency, but also reliability;
• Efficient and effective water distribution systems based on the optimisation of water technologies and allocation policies; and,
• Equitable use of shared water resources between competing uses, by considering both economic efficiency and social equity as criteria in the optimisation approach.

An alternative is the introduction of domain specific heuristics in a multi-tiered approach, using rule-based expert systems, and genetic algorithms, which can make the search much more efficient than traditional methods. Iterating between different levels of aggregation and representation, evolutionary strategies and local stochastic gradient search, a screening level approach and the use of evolutionary concepts of good enough rather than optimal can lead to efficient solutions even for very complex and large-scale problems.

This innovative approach to the optimisation of complex, non-linear, distributed and dynamic systems is embedded in a framework of interactive, participatory decision support based on a secondary layer of discrete multi-criteria optimisation. Using a reference point approach to simplify the expression of preferences and trade-offs, this combined method supports interactive, exploratory use and easy integration in the policy making process.

For the OPTIMA project this means the smooth integration of advanced quantitative optimisation tools into the socio-political, economic and environmental framework of regional development planning and public policy with its uncertainties, qualitative criteria, and conflicting objectives.

The main innovative elements that will contribute to the impacts of the project include:

• A truly multi-criteria problem representation through the combination of numerical simulation of water resources systems with socio-economic elements through rule-based expert systems technology for assessment and qualitative analysis;
• An innovative multi-tiered and iterative approach to the optimisation of complex systems that combines local gradient search with a rule-based adaptive strategy selection with heuristics and genetic algorithms for the efficient design of feasible alternatives;
• The explicit consideration of conflicting objectives, uncertainty, and the necessary political trade-offs and compromises in a second step of discrete multi-criteria optimisation based on the set of feasible alternatives;
• The direct involvement of end users including the concerned public through the use, inter alia, of the Internet and the support of remote clients;
• Integration of technical analysis with educational, awareness-building elements for a broad target audience, aiming at the empowerment of a broad range of actors and local stake holders;
• Long-term sustainability of the project results through direct integration in existing institutional structures including governmental, NGO, and academic institutions as well as the concerned citizen at large.