Urban water in Gulf Cooperation Council countries is principally supplied from desalination plants. However, desalination could be interrupted by natural hazards such as cyclones or harmful algal blooms. Four scenarios have been considered to help public institutions in Muscat to establish a water strategy for emergency situations. The numerical simulations of groundwater pumping have shown that the aquifer can supply emergency water in a safe way without any apparent risk of seawater intrusion to the Al-Khod Aquifer. The results show that Muscat can be easily supplied by emergency groundwater for up to 10 consecutive days with volumes varying between 24 and 71 l/cap/day at a low cost of US$0.18 per m 3 . Covering up to 66% of the total regular demand during an emergency is technically feasible but would bring the cost up to US$1.49 per m 3 for groundwater and a cost of US$38.6 per m 3 for storage reservoirs made of concrete. The cost per m 3 of using concrete reservoirs is close to the market price of bottled water. Finally, the Public Authority for Electricity and Water might think of decentralizing the water storage at house levels by requiring new houses to be equipped with reservoirs on the roofs.
Procurement managers in the different industries rely nowadays on the Reverse Combinatorial Auctions (RCAs) as a trading mechanism that have shown to be very efficient in allocating resources in several applications. RCAs allow the bidders to optimally express their economies of scope, since they can formulate their bids as a bundle of items, rather than on single item. Each bundle should be then either accepted or rejected all together without splitting. Here, we review and discuss the underlying mathematical optimization models that represent the basis of the decision support system and discuss the possible benefits of using such paradigms for the different actors involved in the auctioning process. In addition the paper highlights the advantages of employing RCAs in two major application fields, namely the logistics and food industries, in which this advanced trading paradigm had remarkable success by allowing the bidders to exploit better the synergies among the auctioned items and concede the auctioneers to minimize their procurement costs.
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