A Dynamic Simulation-Optimization Model for Adaptive Management of Urban Water Distribution System Contamination Threats
This addresses the need for improved decision support in managing contamination emergencies for public health and infrastructure security, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The study tackled the problem of timely and adaptive emergency response to contamination threats in urban water distribution systems by developing a dynamic simulation-optimization model that identifies optimal health protection measures in real-time, demonstrated using a mid-size virtual city.
Urban water distribution systems hold a critical and strategic position in preserving public health and industrial growth. Despite the ubiquity of these urban systems, aging infrastructure, and increased risk of terrorism, decision support models for a timely and adaptive contamination emergency response still remain at an undeveloped stage. Emergency response is characterized as a progressive, interactive, and adaptive process that involves parallel activities of processing streaming information and executing response actions. This study develops a dynamic decision support model that adaptively simulates the time-varying emergency environment and tracks changing best health protection response measures at every stage of an emergency in real-time. Feedback mechanisms between the contaminated network, emergency managers, and consumers are incorporated in a dynamic simulation model to capture time-varying characteristics of an emergency environment. An evolutionary-computation-based dynamic optimization model is developed to adaptively identify time-dependant optimal health protection measures during an emergency. This dynamic simulation-optimization model treats perceived contaminant source attributes as time-varying parameters to account for perceived contamination source updates as more data stream in over time. Performance of the developed dynamic decision support model is analyzed and demonstrated using a mid-size virtual city that resembles the dynamics and complexity of real-world urban systems. This adaptive emergency response optimization model is intended to be a major component of an all-inclusive cyberinfrastructure for efficient contamination threat management, which is currently under development.