Development of a System Dynamics Model for Improving Sustainable Urban Water Management (Case Study: Isfahan City)

Abstract

The use of a systematic view has increased to deal with social and environmental problems in recent years. Recently, various models have been developed to address urban water issues. Most of them are focused on runoff and storm water management and few have addressed the problems of the Drinking water system. However, the lack of an effective model that supports complex and multi-objective urban water system in terms of management and decision-making is felt. This article focuses on the importance of a sustainable approach to the conventional approach in urban water management and the need to change attitudes due to the current state of water resources. In this paper a novel system dynamics model has been developed, taking into account the technical, economic, social, environmental and government subsystems that simulate and predict the results of urban water management measures. The results of the implementation of the proposed model on the city of Isfahan showed that the model has a high precision in simulating system condition. The model error rate in simulation of different parameters is less than 5%. Therefore, the model can be used as a tool for analyzing different management strategies before implementing and spending time and cost to assist decision makers.

Keywords

• urban water management
• dynamic modeling
• decision supporting system
• vensim
• isfahan