Towards an efficient and sustainable planning of the drinking water supply chain

Water being one of the most important elements for life on earth and the planetary ecosystem as a whole, it is widely recognized by both society and the United Nations as one of the most important research problems of the modern world. One of the difficulties faced by this system has to do with the management of water treatment plants in the context of sustainable development. This article introduces a decision-making support system conceived to develop an optimal planning aimed at the efficiency and sustainability of the drinking water treatment chain. The system is made up of a mathematical programming model and a solution procedure for the optimal planning of the water treatment in a bi-objective context. Thus, the first objective maximizes profit and the second one minimizes the emission of pollutants. The following constraints are considered: mass balances, production capacities of the different water production echelons and their specific conditions, water supply and demand, and the technically permissible levels of pollutants, which are generically suggested, regardless of the technologies and production alternatives. Due to its particular nature, the model allows solving any instance of the problem in excellent CPU times.