A systems integration approach to the design of regional water desalination and supply networks

Abstract

With the increasing shortages in fresh water supplies around the world, there is an increasing level of installing large-scale water desalination and distribution networks that draw from various sources, use different technologies, and provide water to several destinations. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to the design and decision making of desalination and distribution networks for water supply in regions (or countries). Because of the complexity of the addressed problem, a systems approach is adopted. First, a source-interception-sink representation is developed to embed potential configurations of interest. Next, the design problem is formulated as an optimisation problem subject to the supply, demand, mass conservation, technical performance, and economic constraints. This approach determines the type of technologies to be selected, the location and capacity of the desalination plants, and the distribution of the desalinated water from sources to destinations. A case study is solved to demonstrate the usefulness of the devised approach.