Abstract
Communities around the world are looking for ways to provide reliable and cost-effective infrastructure services to end users. Sustainable and resilient infrastructures are the demands of the day. Both public and private sectors demand resilient and sustainable infrastructure to satisfy the rising consumer demands and foster economic development. While a resilient infrastructure fares well under a catastrophic disaster event by withstanding strongly and recovering quickly, a sustainable infrastructure can function effectively over the lifetime without placing excessive demands on limited resources. There is increased awareness among government entities, municipalities, and communities about the necessity for considering both sustainability and resilience in the decision-making process. There have also been attempts within the research community to develop a common framework for sustainable and resilient infrastructures. However, the studies remained too general and limited to expressions of the need only and not often relevant to water distribution system (WDS). The objective of this chapter is to present a conceptual decision model based on the life cycle thinking (LCT) approach. The WDS from Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) is used as an example to illustrate the use of the model. The proposed model takes into account relevant metrics and parameters to help unify the impacts of sustainability and resilience improvements in a WDS. Improvement measures (scenarios) in the model are considered as decision alternatives. The conflicting aspects of sustainability and resilience are examined using a combination of life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle-based global resilience analysis (GRA) of the infrastructure. LCA includes the evaluation of sustainability using appropriate metrics. GRA is conducted to determine the resiliency of the WDS. Unified evaluation of both resilience and sustainability for the WDS provides the basis of a model for realistic assessment and critical decision-making. The study develops a LCT-based model to help determine the course(s) of action necessary to achieve sustainability and resilience goals, including the necessary trade-offs, while continuing to provide reliable service to consumers.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) for sharing relevant information used in this book chapter regarding the water distribution system.
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Mortula, M.M., Ahmad, I.U., Sadiq, R., Beheiry, S. (2021). A Conceptual Unified Model for Assessing Improvements in Sustainability and Resilience in Water Distribution Systems. In: Eslamian, S., Eslamian, F. (eds) Handbook of Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61278-8_15
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