Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2369. Balancing Equity and Efficiency in Optimal and Market-Based Control of Water Distribution Systems

Invited abstract in session WB-7: Methods in Technical OR, stream Technical Operations Research.

Wednesday, 10:45-12:15
Room: U2-205

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Tobias Constantin Meck
Chair of Fluid Systems, Technische Universität Darmstadt
2. Peter Pelz
Chair of Fluid Systems, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Abstract

Control of water distribution systems needs to meet various expectations, such as low power consumption of the involved pumps and high fulfilment rates during times of peak demand. In previous work, globally optimal solutions for these two objectives were presented for a simple model of a booster station for high-rise buildings. As uncertainties in the system impede the application of this optimal control in practice, an auction-based multi-agent approach was proposed, where the active components of the system, such as pumps and valves, trade volumetric flow rate guarantees on a common market.

In this work, we extend the previous approach by focusing on the fairness of flow distribution among different demand nodes. To this end, the original optimisation problem is extended to include a measure of equity as an additional objective, and the trade-off with efficiency and total fulfilment rates is explored. We show that the auction-based approach results in a reasonably equal distribution of demand fulfilment. Furthermore, it can be tuned to shift the focus towards other objectives, such as allowing more inequality to improve efficiency.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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