Full Description

The Butler County Department of Environmental Services (BCDES) is a regionalsupplier of drinking water in southwestern Ohio with approximately 34,000 customeraccounts. The service area has been consistently increasing over the last 20 years andgrowth is expected to continue at a rapid pace in the future. To address the rapid growth,BCDES has undertaken a Water System Master Plan to identify and plan forimprovements beyond 2022.As a wholesale water purchaser and wholesale provider, BCDES faces unique operationaland planning challenges. They currently purchase water from two different regionalsuppliers and are governed by contractual conditions with each supplier, includingminimum purchase requirements. There are three main supply connection points with thewater suppliers. Future improvements will add at least two more major supplyconnections to provide redundancy in the BCDES system and to enhance the suppliers'ability to deliver peak flows through flow splitting. This significantplanning project could not have been done without several meetings, frequentcommunication, and computer modeling coordination with each supplier.Communication between the water suppliers and BCDES staff is needed on an on-goingbasis to ensure the availability of supply to meet the demands of the growing area.The use of advanced geographic information systems (GIS), hydraulic modeling, and optimization tools allowed for quickand detailed analysis of alternatives, providing valuable information for decision makers.However, factors such as operational flexibility and redundancy cannot be ignored in theanalysis, particularly for systems such as BCDES that rely on external water suppliers.The use of cutting-edge tools such as genetic algorithm (GA) analysis enabled BCDES to analyze severalhundred thousand alternative configurations of the proposed improvements whiletraditional approaches would have resulted in only a few alternatives being evaluated.The GA analysis provided BCDES with confidence that the recommended improvementswill make the most efficient use of their limited funding resources while ensuring reliablesupply of water now and into the distant future. Includes figures.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 02/01/2005 Number of Pages: 7 File Size: 1 file , 350 KB