Tackling the “New Normal”: A Resilience Assessment Method Applied to Real-World Urban Water Systems

Abstract

The water sector is, currently and for the foreseeable future, challenged by rising levels of uncertainty in demand and availability of water, in a context of aging infrastructure and limited investment. In order to support strategic planning, water companies need a way to assess how their system behaves when faced with a range of changing conditions (climatic trends, asset deterioration, behavioral patterns, etc.) as well as accidents/incidents and/or extreme events (wildcards). In this study, a resilience assessment methodology was demonstrated, with ‘stress tests’ alternative water system configurations (including systems designed with decentralized or distributed philosophies) under a range of scenarios and extreme events. A ‘resilience profile graph’ was developed to quantify the performance of each configuration. The methodology was applied to the real-world urban water system of Oasen, which supplies the eastern part of the Province of South Holland, where the current system configuration and two potential future configurations were tested (one decentralized and one distributed). We show how the concept of resilience, operationalized through this methodology, can assist long term decision making and support strategic infrastructure planning.

Towards Circular Water Neighborhoods: Simulation-Based Decision Support for Integrated Decentralized Urban Water Systems

“…In case they are not modeled, the results can be considered as an idealized 'upper limit' of efficiency and autonomy that can be achieved for a proposed decentralized system architecture. Finally, the demonstrated framework is limited to the neighborhood scale in order to be applied to SUPERLOCAL, but can be also applied to larger scales, for instance to large blue-green area design [20], or even to a whole city level [21], possibly with changes to the KPIs to fit the scope of the application. Besides (re-)forming scenarios, decision-makers can return back to step (3) of Figure 3 to refine the design of their chosen decentralized system and see the difference in the results.…”

“…Beyond the application in SUPERLOCAL, it is argued that this framework is readily applicable for the strategic evaluation of circular neighborhood designs with different architectures and at different scales and climates. Building on the expertise of past studies, the framework can be upscaled for the strategic evaluation of circular city designs as well, in order to be part of a resilience assessment toolbox for cities, as envisioned in Nikolopoulos et al [21] and Makropoulos et al [57]. This type of study is envisaged to provide, along with supplementary tools on the strategic, tactical and operational scale, a solid base for the design and strategic evaluation of integrated decentralized systems as parts of a broader circular water management strategy, thus enabling the transition towards a circular and more sustainable future for urban water.…”

“…These multi-domain effects need to be part of an integrated performance assessment to allow for a multi-faceted evaluation of the system of interest to all stakeholders. Moreover, such an integrated framework needs ideally to reach beyond the urban water cycle and explore external driving factors, such as climate change, behavioral client shifts, demographic changes, capital and operational costs etc., in order to account for the strong uncertainties seen in urban water management [21]. Research questions therefore arise, asking for integrated frameworks able to assess the performance and impact of a combined decentralized system that: (a) takes into account the aforementioned effects on multiple urban water cycle domains, (b) that can be expanded to account for multiple dimensions (e.g., social, technological, environmental and financial), which can be then considered drivers of change in the system.In light of these questions, the contribution of this study is towards the development of a quantitative assessment framework, able to support decisions by evaluating the performance of the combined decentralized system in a way that can be easily interpreted by stakeholders.…”

Stress-Testing Framework for Urban Water Systems: A Source to Tap Approach for Stochastic Resilience Assessment

“…In practice though, this proves to be expensive and inevitably futile [13][14][15], also giving a false expectation of perpetual reliability [14]. A volatile ever-changing global landscape with significant direct and indirect effects on the water sector is fast becoming the 'New Normal' [16] and makes 'fail-safe' aspirations unrealistic. Thus, it is argued that a paradigm shift [17] is needed.…”

Resilient Urban Water Services for the 21th Century Society—Stakeholder Survey in Finland

“…They categorized Sustainability and resilience in water services have been studied and applying these principles has been attempted in several countries, e.g., [7,8]. The studies often concentrate on some special subjects or themes, like urban water technology and infrastructure [10], operational management [11], governance [12], or they try to define a method for analyzing the system [13]. The research gap addressed by this study is to develop a wider perspective in technical, institutional and socioeconomic aspects of water resilience.…”