Water pollution management with evolutionary multi-objective optimisation and preferences

Abstract

[EN] Dealing with real world engineering problems, often comes with facing multiple and conflicting objectives and requirements. Water distributions systems (WDS) are not exempt from this: while cost and hydraulic performance are usually conflicting objectives, several requirements related with environmental issues in water sources might be in conflict as well. Commonly, optimisation statements are defined in order to address the WDS design and/or management. Multi-objective optimisation can handle such conflicting objectives, by means of a simultaneous optimisation of the design objectives. At the end of such process, a potential set of solutions, the Pareto front, are calculated. In such a set of solutions, there is not a best solution, but a preferable solution. In this paper, we will apply a multi-objective optimisation process with preferences in order to deal with a water pollution management constrained problem with 6 design objectives. With the provided example, it will be shown the usefulness of such tools for decision making and trade-off analysis for WDS management.