An integrated optimisation platform for sustainable resource and infrastructure planning

It is crucial for sustainable planning to consider broad environmental and social dimensions and systemic implications of new infrastructure to build more resilient societies, reduce poverty, improve human well-being, mitigate climate change and address other global change processes. This article presents resilience.io, 2 a platform to evaluate new infrastructure projects by assessing their design and effectiveness in meeting growing resource demands, simulated using Agent-Based Modelling due to socio-economic population changes. We then use Mixed-Integer Linear Programming to optimise a multi-objective function to find cost-optimal solutions, inclusive of environmental metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions. The solutions in space and time provide planning guidance for conventional and novel technology selection, changes in network topology, system costs, and can incorporate any material, waste, energy, labour or emissions flow. As an application, a use case is provided for the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector for a four million people city-region in Ghana

Water and energy systems in sustainable city development: a case of Sub-saharan Africa

Current urban water and energy systems are expanding while increasing attention is paid to their social, economic and environmental impacts. As a research contribution that can support real-world decision making and transitions to sustainable cities and communities, we have built a model-based and data-driven platform combining comprehensive database, agent-based simulation and resource technology network optimization for system level water and energy planning. Several use cases are demonstrated based on the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) city-region in Ghana, as part of the Future Cities Africa (FCA) project. The outputs depict an overall resource landscape of the studied urban area, but also provide the energy, water, and other resource balance of supply and demand from both macro and micro perspectives, which is used to propose environmental friendly and cost effective sustainable city development strategies. This work is to become a core component of the resilience.io platform as an open-source integrated systematic tool gathering social, environmental and economic data to inform urban planning, investment and policy-making for city-regions globally

An integrated optimisation platform for sustainable resource and infrastructure planning

It is crucial for sustainable planning to consider broad environmental and social dimensions and systemic implications of new infrastructure to build more resilient societies, reduce poverty, improve human well-being, mitigate climate change and address other global change processes. This article presents resilience.io, 2 a platform to evaluate new infrastructure projects by assessing their design and effectiveness in meeting growing resource demands, simulated using Agent-Based Modelling due to socio-economic population changes. We then use Mixed-Integer Linear Programming to optimise a multi-objective function to find cost-optimal solutions, inclusive of environmental metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions. The solutions in space and time provide planning guidance for conventional and novel technology selection, changes in network topology, system costs, and can incorporate any material, waste, energy, labour or emissions flow. As an application, a use case is provided for the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector for a four million people city-region in Ghana

Energy-water nexus design and operation towards the sustainable development goals

Urbanization is taking place rapidly, while the planning of energy, water and resource capacities in many cities especially in developing countries is lagging behind. Motivated by the lack of transparent data-driven decision-making support, a systematic methodology to support sustainable development emphasizing the energy-water nexus and multiple resource systems is developed. It serves as an open-source integrated tool to advice the planning, operation and decision-making considering social, environmental and economic sustainability globally. Several applications of the platform are demonstrated based on a sub-Saharan African metropolitan area. The outputs depict energy, water, and other resource demand, supply and transport on multiple spatiotemporal scales, which are used to indicate cost effective and environmentally friendly development strategies. The total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated with the nexus are minimized to 0.56 tonnes CO2 equivalent per capita in 2030, resulting to a 51.4% reduction compared with the business-as-usual scenario, while providing sufficient resources to address sustainable development goals

A nexus approach for sustainable urban energy-water-waste systems planning and operation

Energy, water and waste systems analyzed at a nexus level is key to move towards more sustainable cities. In this paper, the “resilience.io” platform is developed and applied to emphasize on waste-to-energy pathways, along with the water and energy sectors, aiming to develop waste treatment capacity and energy recovery with the lowest economic and environmental cost. Three categories of waste including wastewater (WW), municipal solid waste (MSW) and agriculture waste are tested as the feedstock for thermochemical treatment via incineration, gasification or pyrolysis for combined heat and power generation, or biological treatment such as anaerobic digestion (AD) and aerobic treatment. A case study is presented for Ghana in Sub-Saharan Africa, considering a combination of waste treatment technologies and infrastructure, depending on local characteristics for supply and demand. The results indicate that the biogas generated from waste treatment turns out to be a promising renewable energy source in the analyzed region, while more distributed energy resources can be integrated. A series of scenarios including the business-as-usual, base case, natural constrained, policy interventions and environmental and climate change impacts demonstrate how simulation with optimization models can provide new insights in the design of sustainable value chains, with particular emphasis on whole-system analysis and integration

Sustainable planning of the energy-water-food nexus using decision making tools

Developing countries struggle to implement suitable electric power and water services, failing to match infrastructure with urban expansion. Integrated modelling of urban water and power systems would facilitate the investment and planning processes, but there is a crucial gap to be filled with regards to extending models to incorporate the food supply in developing contexts. In this paper, a holistic methodology and platform to support the resilient and sustainable planning at city region level for multiple sectors was developed for applications in urban energy systems (UES) and the energy-water-food nexus, combining agent-based modelling - to simulate and forecast resource demands on spatial and temporal scales - with resource network optimization, which incorporates capital expenditures, operational costs, environmental impacts and the opportunity cost of food production foregone (OPF). Via a scenario based approach, innovative water supply and energy deployment policies are presented, which address the provision of clean energy for every citizen and demonstrate the potential effects of climate change. The results highlighted the vulnerability of Ghanas power generation infrastructure and the need for diversification. Feed-in tariffs and investment into supporting infrastructure and agriculture intensification will effectively increase the share of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions