A handy tool for forecasting population to aid estimation of water demand

1587-1592Estimation of demographic variations for societal or infrastructural development policies requires accurate prediction of futuristic population for a given locality. Economic viability as well as sustainability at large, of the engineering designs in urban development activities depend on the variations in projected populations for a given design period. Considering the uncertainties in existing calculation practices to derive an average value, present study offers a computationally efficient program capable of forecasting the future population based on the existing past population data using three well-known population forecasting methods, namely, arithmetic increase method, geometric increase method and incremental increase method. The results proved that when compared to manual calculation, the predictions were accurate, precise and computationally efficient. This user-friendly tool will be highly beneficial for various service providers where population forecasting is inevitable. The robustness of the computer code has been demonstrated using six decades of real time census data of Coimbatore city