Our CEO Ian Griffiths and our Senior Consultant Kevis Pachos will be presenting at Gurobi Days Digital on 4 May at 4.30-5.30pm UK time. Their talk is devoted to Next Generation Water Investment Model that Decision Lab has developed to help the water companies with planning for the next 75 years and beyond!
Here is the description of the presentation.
The shortage of water resources is high on the agenda of many countries. Despite its reputation for rain, the UK is not an exception, and particularly in the southeast of England where high population (more than 19 million people) places a great burden on the water supply. As a regulatory requirement, every 5 years water companies in England and Wales must produce plans on how they will meet their future demand. This is a complex problem with potentially very large supply-demand deficits. Because of the long planning horizon of 75 years, the uncertainties in climate, population and legislative drivers are significant. There is a need to optimise against this uncertain future to produce resilient plans. Previously, the main focus had been on identifying the least cost plan that met demand – a relatively straightforward optimisation problem. But being able to produce plans that are resilient and adaptable to uncertain events decades in the future and also incorporate other performance metrics (environmental benefit, customer preference and more) is a major technical challenge. We will describe how we at Decision Lab have developed a completely new water investment model. It uses cutting-edge optimisation techniques – stochastic programming, real option analysis, adaptive pathways, multi-criteria optimisation – overlaid on the least-cost optimal solution. The Gurobi Solver is a key part of our solution, and we will explain how we have utilised this and how Gurobi supported us in our efforts. The model is being used now within the southeast of England. We hope the model may also help with planning for other parts of the country and even outside the UK, where many regions of the world face significant challenges of future water deficits. The model has huge potential to be adapted to other industries and sectors.
