Optimal Operation of Water-Supply Systems

Abstract

The traditional metropolitan water -supply planning problem is characterized by two main steps: (a) project future water requirements based on present rates of economic growth,, and (b) schedule water development projects to be introduced into the system on time to meet these predicted requirements. The City of Tucson plans its water supply essentially in this manner. The prime objective of this phase of our research was to formally review the above problem and to formulate it in terms of concepts of management science. Implied commitments to accept Colorado River water and gradual changes in quality of Tucson's groundwater force serious consideration of the economic tradeoffs between alternative sources and uses of water. These alternatives lead to a need for a restatement of water - supply planning objectives in more precise forms than have heretofore been put forth. The doctoral dissertation by G. Clausen addresses itself to the above restatement with actual data on the Tucson basin. The various water -supply planning objective functions including the traditional one are all expressions which maximize the difference between gains and losses involved with water development. They can be expressed mathematically and differentiated on the basis of how these gains and losses are defined. In the traditional sense, gains derived from meeting projected requirements are assumed to be infinite, and losses are taken to be actual project costs and not social costs associated with undesirable economic growth. Therefore, maximization of net gains is accomplished by minimizing project costs, and gains do not even have to be expressed. Consideration of alternatives, however, requires that gains be expressed quantitatively as benefits to individuals, communities, or regions, i.e., primary, secondary, or tertiary benefits. The same logic holds for the expression of total costs. An objective function, used to express the water- supply problem in the Tucson Basin, considers gains as cash revenue to a hypothetical central water - control agency which sells water to the users within the basin. Losses are considered as marginal costs to the agency for producing, treating, and distributing water. The concept of economic demand is used to estimate the amount of water that municipal, industrial, and agricultural users will purchase at different prices. Linear demand functions are postulated. The possible sources of supply considered are groundwater from within the basin, groundwater from the neighboring Avra Valley Basin, reclaimed waste water, and Central Arizona Project water from the Colorado River. Constraints are formulated to allow for limits on water availability, for social limits on water prices, and for minimal requirements of each user over a specified time period; these permit a determination of optimal allocations of water under different conditions to answer "what if' questions, given the assumptions of the model. The resulting static model is termed a pricing model and is optimized by first decomposing the objective function into component parts with each part representing terms involving only one source of water. In instances involving inequality constraints, quadratic programming is used. In other instances where equality constraints or unconstrained conditions exist, Lagrange multipliers and calculus methods are used. These latter conditions arise when it is determined at which point certain constraints become inactive. In the completely general case, this type of decomposition is not possible, but it appears that in many specific uses objective functions of this nature can be profitably decomposed and optima determined much more conveniently than otherwise possible. The model clearly identifies the opportunity costs associated with the required use of Colorado River water in lieu of the cheaper Tucson groundwater.