Metropolitan water supply allocation and operation

Abstract

In metropolitan areas, water is supplied to consumers from one or more sources through separate but adjacent systems of facilities commonly owned and operated by municipal governments. Allocation of production and distribution is determined by the demand contained within municipal boundaries rather than on the basis of regional efficiency. Some systems may have more capacity than required to meet their needs, while others have insufficient capacity; and the excess capacity of one system could be used to augment the system that lacks capacity and thereby improve the overall efficiency of utilization. When viewed as a regional allocation problem, then, the challenge is to minimize the total cost of providing potable water with a given set of facilities (in the economic short-run sense). This can be accomplished by equating the marginal costs of production plus transportation among all interconnected systems of the region, while meeting, as constraints, water demands and capacity limitations. Production cost and transportation (distribution) cost functions were determined for selected water supply systems (or subsystems) in the Chicago area. Production cost and transportation cost functions were determined econometrically and, for transportation costs, technologically using a geometric programming procedure. The resulting cost functions were then used in an example problem to illustrate the utility of the proposed methodology for allocation and operation.U.S. Geological SurveyU.S. Department of the InteriorOpe