How to realize sustainable urban water supply network through intelligent governance of leakage: A perspective of water-conservation strategy optimization

Leakage in urban water supply network is a common issue worldwide, which exacerbates water scarcity. Although water-saving contract provides a novel approach for achieving intelligent leakage control, how to formulate effective water-conservation strategy remains an urgent issue to be solved. Based on this, this paper focuses on the water-conservation service supply chain consisting of a water supply company and a water-conservation service company. Using differential game, this paper constructs dynamic decision-making models for multiple water-conservation modes, compares the differences between different modes and reveals the optimal water-conservation strategy. The results show that leakage control cost coefficient and unit cost of water-conservation services negatively affect the optimal leakage control efforts and leakage control level in urban water supply network, while multiple factors jointly influence the optimal technological innovation efforts. Compared with autonomous water conservation mode, cooperative modes are superior in terms of both profit and water savings when the unit cost of water-conservation services and leakage control cost coefficient are higher. Among three cooperative modes, from the point of profit maximization, cooperating innovation and sharing revenue mode is superior, and appropriate distribution of leakage control cost and water-conservation revenue can contribute to the achievement of this mode. From maximizing water-conservation benefit, sharing innovation-input and water-conservation revenue mode is optimal, and whether members can achieve this mode depends on sharing ratios of the water-conservation revenue and the innovation cost.